


The Things that Don't Destroy Us

by PrincessDesire



Series: Deconstruction and Restoration [1]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ableism, Canonical decreasing in Finn, Force Sensitivity, Gen, Gen or Pre-Het, Huxdemption, Implied/Referenced Torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Probably Not As Dark As It Sounds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:40:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 52,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24510043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrincessDesire/pseuds/PrincessDesire
Summary: General Hux and Rey survive a ship crash that leaves them both broken. Rey, unable to tap into the Force, sees something in Hux who can no longer walk and the two form a tentative friendship.
Relationships: Armitage Hux & Rey, Finn & Rey (Star Wars)
Series: Deconstruction and Restoration [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2002105
Comments: 7
Kudos: 47





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in a magical limbo of months between TFA and TLJ that didn’t happen. Rey has been helping the Resistance and training with Leia. The Ren and Rey Force bond hasn’t happened.

The vast galaxy of stars makes her want to throw up. Nothing ever throws off her equilibrium, not for long anyway, and she wouldn’t be nearly as efficient at retrieving others’ used junk if that wasn’t the case. Yet no matter how long she waits, the spinning won’t seem to stop and there’s a pain in her head that hurts her eyes. She’d been in darkness hadn’t she? Had she been asleep? She can’t remember what she was just doing. She puts her hands to her head, then to her eyes. Yes, that dulls the brightness of the stars, but it doesn’t make them stop turning. Or is it she who is turning? She can feel her eyelashes on her hands so she knows she’s blinking. What is the whining sound she hears? It’s so shrill. Perhaps it’s an alarm of some sort. 

Ground. She just needs to find a ground. Removing her hands in order to search makes her vulnerable to the brightness again, but she needs to feel where the ground is. Then she can orient herself. She finds firmness under her right arm around the same time that the shapes she’d sort of assumed were planets start to take on firmer edges. Her vision is mostly red, but there are those black shapes. She can’t tell what they are. The ground is cold and metal-firm. 

It takes forever, longer than she’s been alive, for her sight to return and for the twirling to slow enough that she can push herself up onto one arm. The nausea surges with the change in position, but it helps clear the lights and the blobs in her eyes. She’s on a ship. Only, the ship is tilted and smashed. Everything is illuminated by red flood lamps and sparking electronics. The klaxon’s volume is decreasing along with the blobs in her vision, meaning that it was probably just her head all along, though it had sure sounded like an emergency alarm, shrill and persistent. 

Before standing up, she first shifts her weight onto her knees to see if she can handle the movement. As she’d expected, the dizziness intensifies, but her vision doesn’t blur, so she stands. The ground turns out to be a broken walkway, her feet at an odd angle on its slope. It may increase her nausea, but the new standing position makes her brain immediately more alert. She doesn’t recognize the ship. It might look familiar if it wasn’t damaged, but she doesn’t know it now, nor why she’s here or where here is. 

“Where am I?” she asks out loud, testing her hearing. Her voice rumbles in the low parts and pierces in the high, but she can hear it. It’s a relief, a small one given how she’s feeling, but something onto which she can hold.

“You’re on my ship.” A voice replies.

She hadn’t actually been expecting a response; she whips her head too fast to spot the speaker and circles like the bubbles in champagne float around her vision. She clutches onto the sides of her head, willing the pain and visual detritus away. She pushes into her skull, finding some relief in the hard pressure. 

“Or what used to be my ship,” the disembodied voice continues. “Before you and your rebel friends shot her down.”

Where is he? She takes a step, slowly and tentatively, down the slope of the walkway to the more stable floor. She sees only busted machinery and torn structures that used to be support beams or internal hulls. He’d said shot by her friends. Finn, maybe, or Poe. Why is she on this ship? If the throbbing deep within her skull would stop, even if only for a moment, maybe she could remember.

Her careful steps bring her to where she thinks she’d heard the voice. Her own damaged navigational abilities have brought her to a pile of twisted metal. She blinks at it, feeling like there’s something to the image that she’s not seeing, like an optical illusion. 

“And you’re in nearly as bad a shape as my ship.” Once he speaks and her eyes are able to really focus, she finds the man within the mass. From the look of it, most of the debris fell above him, not directly over him, so that he’s within a cocoon of fallen debris. One of his legs is sticking out, the other is completely hidden by metal along with the rest of his lower torso. His chest, arms, and head are unpinned. Everything is red under the light and yet she can tell that he’s pale because his skin is also glossy. Blood loss, maybe, or shock. He doesn’t sound like he’s in shock; if anything his voice sounds too calm, resigned.

Even in this state, she recognizes him because the only other time that she’s seen him, he’d also been bathed in red light, the red light that had brought the destruction of the Hosnian system. “I know you! You’re the man who fired Starkiller. You! You… ended... ended billions of lives.” She stutters from the sudden anger that makes her head pound harder.

“And I know you. You’re the scavenger who destroyed my weapon and split Kylo Ren’s face in two.” His eyes are penetrating and the way they reflect the light makes them look like fireballs, but there’s no anger there in his voice. It’s cold, nonchalant. This man has accepted that he’s going to die. If anyone has ever deserved it more, Rey doesn’t know it. “Kudos, for that latter part. He always did look too…” he pauses trying to find a word to describe the Dark Side user. “Confident.”

She pushes her palm against a spot above her right ear. It feels as though she needs to keep her brain from bursting out. “You’re an evil man and you deserve exactly what you get,” she seethes. “I’m glad my friends shot down your ship.”

Her vitriol fails to impress him. “With you on it, it seems.”

It does seem that way. Perhaps they didn’t know she was here. Trying to remember only brings a sharper pain, a pinprick that stabs all the way through. 

She’s wasting time with this devil of a man. She needs to figure out where she is. He’d said the ship was shot down, so they must have landed planetside. They must have been pretty low to have survived the drop, fresh from take-off or touchdown. She needs to get the word out to her friends that she’s alive. 

Rey looks around her. Good luck, she thinks sarcastically. Finding technology onboard functional enough to send out a distress communication seems like a stretch. If it was a bigger ship, like the last one of the First Order’s that she’d been aboard, she’d have plenty to choose from, but this is a smaller craft, closer to the Falcon than the Finalizer. If her vision was better, if the headache would abate, it would perhaps be a stimulating challenge, but now she feels incapable of forming coherent thoughts and her memory is as shot full of holes as this ship. 

With baby steps, she moves around the cockpit away from the viewport. She needs to see what the rest of the ship looks like. Unfortunately, she’s not going to get that answered. The door that no doubt led to things like food storage, weapons, and envirosuits is twisted, irrevocably turned into a wall. Just to cover all her bases, she presses on the door panel and is unsurprised by the lack of response. Carefully, she returns to the trapped man.

“Where’s your communication relay?” 

“Probably crushing one of my men somewhere.” He says unhelpfully. 

It’s large for a cockpit, looking more reminiscent of a small command deck. The section of control panels closest to the viewport is on its side and sending out an occasional spark, but she wagers that that’s where the transmissions are sent from, or had been sent from; this ship would never fly again. 

“Are you even aware that you’re bleeding?” he asks. He’s staring at her face and so she touches around where he’s looking. When she feels the wetness beneath her nostrils, she pulls back slick fingers. That’s probably not good. She looks at him with worry. “Not just there. Your ears.” 

Immediately her fingers trace around her ears. She can only feel the sensation with her fingers; the ears are numb. She finds wetness in the groove beneath her ear holes. Panic rises within her and the ringing, never completely gone, increases. “I… I think I hit my head.”

She doesn’t know this First Order villain well enough to understand his facial reaction, but she studies it nonetheless. She wants to gauge how bad off she is by how bad he thinks it is. But his words about how she looks make more sense now. She’s been talking to him with blood coming from her ears and her nose and, no doubt, a dazed look as she attempts to piece together where she is and how she came to be there. Is she like him? Dying?

There’s a tremble in her voice when she asks him, “Was that the comm?” She points. 

He nods, confirming her guess.

It’s embarrassing how carefully she has to climb over the debris to not upset her equilibrium. She searches around for the comm. It takes her so long and she isn’t even sure she’s found it when she has because it is smashed almost beyond identification. Against her head’s preferences, she crouches beside it, pulls out a clump of disconnected wires from the casing. It takes her a long moment to identify where the wires had formerly gone. Her heart sinks. No, she can’t repair this, wouldn’t be able to even with proper lighting and proper brain function.

She allows her butt to fall the rest of the way to the floor and she holds the wires while fighting back an influx of crying she knows will do her head no favors. She needs to strategize what comes next but she can’t think properly. It’s all so muddled. She feels sleepy, suddenly, and she feels like the light isn’t so bright as it was.

“Scavenger, did you find it?”

The bad man’s voice jolts her. She’d forgotten about him over there sweating and immobile with his crushed limbs and hopelessness. She dares not yell again, remembering how it had felt before. Instead, she gets up and makes her way back to him. 

His face is inquisitive until it stops being so as he reads her disappointment. He seems to have none of his own. Of course not. He can’t expect her to help rescue him, not after what he’s done. But now he can watch her plight, maybe even her death. No, she can’t think like that. A defeatist attitude is not what had kept her on Jakku all those years. She won’t be joining him in his death acceptance. 

“I’ll figure something else out,” she says. 

“No doubt,” he replies. She can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not. 

The destruction around her could have useful tech. Some of it could be repairable. She should go through it, see what she can find. She wants to lie down instead. Perhaps they know she’s here. It’s possible if she waits long enough, they’ll come to search the inside of the ship looking for survivors or supplies. The possibilities seem too numerous and they flit around her like fireflies. She considers reaching out to grab one and finds herself stumbling, just a bit, but it jars her into some alertness. She blinks away the visualization and rubs at her forehead. 

He’s watching her. She finds herself explaining, though she doesn’t know why. “I’m having trouble focusing.”

“You were wanting to find another way to contact your friends.”

“What planet did we crash on?” It’s perhaps the most intelligent thought she’s had since she’d woken up. He should know if he was the captain… general? This man is everything that Leia is not, but Rey feels like she remembers this man being a general. It’s too noble of a title for a killer of worlds’ worth of people.

“Nethic.” The word means nothing to her, possibly because of her head injury, probably because she’s never heard of it before. When she scrunches up her face attempting to will her recollection, he says more. “Argon atmosphere, unbreathable and hell on the eyes. Very sparsely populated by two sentient species.”

She can’t just walk out then, not without a breathing apparatus of some kind. The only solution she can see is creating a beacon of some sort, hoping that her friends aren’t too busy fighting what’s left of the order to find her. Her most pressing concern is the damage to her head. What happens when she falls asleep? With no medical training, she doesn’t know the exact odds, but she has a guess that she might not wake up again. 

“I need to make a beacon.”

When she was younger, she’d found a portable utility light and attached it to a four or five-meter long stick. She had erected it like a light pole, hoping that it would guide her parents back to her. Eventually, its batteries had died and she had never bothered to replace it but had left the pole there, unwilling to acknowledge the futility of any of her actions. The light had been orange, not red like the color around her now, but it feels like she can see it, like the floodlights might be morphing into that stick.

“Scavenger!”

Rey jerks at the yell. With wide eyes she realizes she’d been falling asleep, right there. Her startled gaze holds his solid one. 

“I almost fell asleep,” she says, though she thinks she went farther than almost.

He nods. “It’s the concussion. I would advise against doing it again.”

His help is surprising, more so when she realizes he’s supplied her with nothing but useful information. “You…” she almost voices it but stops. Men like him, the ones who never do anything good for anyone, they think looking out for others makes a person weak. She’s met many evil men in her lifetime. Though, some deep instinct tells her not to lump him in with the others so easily; he is hard to read and that makes him hard to anticipate as well. He is more dangerous than anyone else she’s met, with the exception of Kylo Ren. “Thank you.”

“You were going to make a beacon,” he reminds her. 

“I’m going to. Would you… yell at me… if I need it?” She’s asking favors now from him and that places a debt there, but the alternative could be deadly. Besides, if she’s rescued, there’s a chance that they’ll rescue him, even if that salvation comes in the form of a quick blast to the head and not a slow death by internal bleeding. He must be thinking of ways that it could serve him, because he agrees.

“Consider it my pleasure,” he says.

Rey sets off to find useful things, as she always does. 

* * *

16 hours earlier

Like all the other planets in this system, Nethic’s atmosphere is pure poison for humans, so Finn had known that to accompany General Leia to the surface meant putting on a helmet again. He’d accepted that, or at least thought he had, because now that he’s down here with the bucket back on his head, he’s panicking. Too much of his life has been spent standing around as a silent, nondescript guard to people with way more power than he’ll ever have. He may know that the situation is different but his nerves don’t seem to be receiving the message. At least he can see out of this one and he takes advantage of that, looking often for the reassuring presence of Poe next to him.

“Where the hell’s Rey?” he mutters.

She was supposed to rendezvous with them in orbit around Nethic, but the meetup time, 1700 the previous day, had come and gone without a word. Leia had left orders to have her meeting interrupted should Rey finally show up, so she must have some level of concern but Finn couldn’t see the worry. It certainly wasn’t expanding within her every single hour until it felt like she’d explode with fear like it was for him.

Rey can hold her own, he’s seen that with his own two eyes, felt it when she’d knocked him flat on his ass when they’d first met on Jakku, but kicking one power-hungry space wizard’s ass didn’t mean that she was invincible. She could still be hurt or killed. He wants to know that she’s alright. Then maybe he can deal with how frightened he is of being back in his helmet.

“Probably having more fun than we are,” says Poe. 

“Whiner. You’d never have lasted as a trooper.” Inside, he agrees with Poe. He doesn’t want to wait through any more clandestine meetings like this one. He wants to make his own assignments, not have them meted out to him. He wants his life to start. He knows, logically, that’s exactly what will happen once they defeat the First Order. Then he’ll be so overwhelmed by his choices that he’ll probably just follow Rey and Poe around like a loyal puppy. Freedom, he’s learned, is scary.

The room is large and unfurnished save for some ugly tapestries that hang on all sides, providing dampening for conversations that should not be overheard. According to Poe, who follows this sort of thing more than Finn’s own experience or interest level allows, the man with whom they’re meeting has a reputation for knowing everything. Though their helmets muffle the dialogue occurring between the general and Prylar Enzo, he could strain to listen, if he wanted to, but what would be the point? Anything interesting that occurs as a result of this meeting will be easily summarized later, probably by Poe who keeps in the know so that he can take action later.

“That’s not whining. Whining is what you’ve been doing,” Poe says. His voice is unnecessarily low, given their distance from Leia and the Prylar.

“I’m just worried about a friend. She’s your friend too you know.”

General Leia hands something to Prylar Enzo. He examines it briefly before passing it to his own retinue. They run a scanner over it, checking it as though it’s even a possibility that Leia would just hand them a bomb. Finn suspects it’s the device that Rey’s been working with the Raddus’s scientists on for the past few months. So that’s why they’ve had to meet in person, why he’s trapped in this stifling helmet; Leia wants to be the one to put the device into the intermediary’s hands before it makes its way to their insider. 

“That friend could kick your ass up one wall and down another. Now, shut up.” Poe flashes him a judgy glance before straightening up and looking forward like a good, attentive bodyguard. 

This is good and Finn suspects that this bickering is for his sake. It feels normal, helps with claustrophobia. 

“Don’t tell me to shut up…” whispers Finn, but he’s not angry. 

Finn’s worry is not allayed over the next few hours; no communication messages interrupt General Leia in her conversation with the prylar. They keep an eye out for her as they make their way back to the Resistance transport. The roads here are nothing but dirt where foliage doesn’t grow. The indigenous population is low, few beings thrive in the high argon concentration, but they are not the only visitors trapped inside their helmets of breathable air. None of the handful of faces they pass, with breathing apparati or without, are Rey’s. 

Leia, though eager to leave, delays their departure from Nethic. After 12 hours, she receives a call for assistance from the Prylar. A second one comes 3 hours after that. Apparently he’s as eager to see this batch of Resistance fighters leave as they are to go. When Leia touches Finn’s hand, assures him that Rey will catch up, even Poe looks ill at ease.

* * *

When parts of the Antioch had landed upon him, Hux had felt the worst pain in his life. He’d caught his finger in mechanical joints before, but he’d always been able to immediately pull it out again with a blood blister or bruise the only lasting mark of the incident. But he can’t move the portion of his ship that landed on his leg and pelvis and this is going to leave a greater mark than a jamb. The intense pain hadn’t actually lasted very long. All those hormones that help a body cope had done their jobs and then he hadn’t felt much of anything, except thirst. Hux is a trained soldier, even if his parentage kept him from much ground combat (thank you, Father) and he knows the symptoms of shock include overwhelming thirst. Still, it’s unreasonable how strong the sensation is. Here he lies with what feels like a mountain atop him and all he can think about is water or caf or anything that could diminish this violent need inside him. Even now, with the adrenaline and endorphins starting to wane, masking properties fading like dimming light fixtures, he is less concerned by the new thrum of pain that is starting than his thirst. He resisted asking Rey to find him water. As long as he’s in shock, there’s a chance that he’ll just vomit up the water and lose the fluids he already has, not to mention he’d be buried under metal _and_ covered in vomit. There’s also a high possibility that she wouldn’t fetch him a damn thing. She believes him solely responsible for firing the weapon on Starkiller Base, a lone icon of genocide.

Well, let her think it. Enough do. He doesn’t know enough yet to make any proper judgments on her, knowing mostly only what her capture means to Kylo Ren. She’s resourceful, that’s certain. He’s amazed by how quickly she set to task despite the drying blood trails all over her face and the intermittent glassy quality to her eyes. She thinks that she needs to save herself, so that might be something she’s used to doing. She needn’t bother. Her friends will be checking soon to see if there are survivors, potential hostages. He’s surprised they haven’t already shown up, poking around to see what trophies they can salvage from the new wreckage. Unlike him, she will survive this.

“Scavenger!” he calls. It’s easy to keep a rhythm when your stomach is pulsing with trapped arteries desperate to do their jobs.

“Awake,” she says, voice not far from him.

He has been too distracted trying not to ask for water to pay attention to what she’s been doing. He may cave and ask once his skin stops creating lakes of sweat, tapped out of natural fluids, or, if he is strong enough, stubborn enough, he can wait until her friends arrive and either execute him, leave him to die, or take him captive. His future is much bleaker than it had been when he’d woken up this morning. He can’t say that he really cares. He feels as though he wouldn’t mind being publicly executed, a shining example of what the rebellion does to their enemies, so long as he got a nice tall glass of ice cold water first.

He speaks at normal volume, now that he’s aware of her location. “Are you having luck?”

She appears before him, a makeshift spear in her hand roughly two meters long. Attached to it are several devices, one of which is glowing a green of technological functionality. It has power. He blinks in surprise at it. “I make my own luck,” she says. 

Impressive.

“I think it’s working. I think it would work better outside,” she says quietly, looking as though in hypnosis at the beacon. “You should know that the doors are stuck. We don’t have access to the rest of the ship.”

They don’t have access to water then. If they are trapped here in the cockpit, he can’t ask for water because she won’t find any. It makes him want to cry. He’s resigned himself to die but to die with this thirst seems too cruel even to a man who expects the universe to be so. A sound escapes from him then, almost a whine, as though 30 years of tamping down his emotions meant nothing.

He needn’t worry about her judging his tiny outburst because she’s not aware of it. She looks unsteady on her feet. Her hair is askew. What had formerly been buns are now just hair angles, surreal art pieces. Her eyes are glazed. No, her whole face has a frosted glass appearance. She’s losing her battle for consciousness. Maybe she actually will die. Maybe her friends won’t get her medical care in time. It seems like such a waste. It’s a waste if they both die here, their respective talents going with them. 

“Scavenger, are you okay?” Silly, because of course she isn’t, but his voice has been effective at snapping her out of her trances.

It works this time, but he suspects that won’t always be the case. “Rey. My name is Rey.”

“Indeed it is,” he says. 

“You’re a general, aren’t you?”

That’s a tricky question. “Yes, I suppose I still am a general, for a while anyway.” There’s a pause while she considers something, he guesses that she wants to know his name. Surely she knows it, everyone does after the Hosnian incident, and it must be driving her crazy that she doesn’t remember it. “My name is Armitage Brendol Hux and you were going to ask me if there is another way outside of the ship besides through the main entry ramp.”

“Hux,” she repeats, practically snapping her fingers with recognition. “Yes. Is there another way?”

“Well, you can’t exactly roll down a window and stick it on the front viewport.”

She frowns at exactly the same time a tremor runs all the way through his body. He lurches. He feels some pain and lots of fear. Is this an organ shutting down? The start of his heart giving up the battle? Rey moves to him, but there isn’t anything to do but watch. Perhaps that brings her pleasure but she looks worried and the hands she’s holding out above him, it’s like she wants to assist. He shuts his eyes tight and waits for the shaking to stop. So, this is what dying feels like, like being captive to your own processes. It’s going to get more real than this even, much worse.

It does subside, eventually, though not completely and he opens his eyes to the girl’s alert expression. “Well, you could stand there enjoying the process of me dying, or you could see if there is a functional forward docking hatch to test your makeshift beacon’s durability to a ground jettisoning.”

“I’m not enjoying any of this,” she replies sadly. For a moment they just look at each other. With all the gore, she looks battle-hardened and Hux approves, having always preferred resilience to fragility. In another dimension maybe, another timeline, they could have worked well together. “I’ll let you know if it works.” It’s more than he’s owed by her, for sure.

He watches her step gingerly away. While she works her way around the cockpit, picking up bits of trash in an attempt to find something that doesn’t exist, he takes his pulse. Surely there’s only so long it can keep up its frantic beat, but each check returns the same alarming pace. He pushes on his chest. That’s one of the few places on his body that doesn’t hurt. He can’t move either foot, not even the one attached to his untrapped leg. So, spinal damage, probably. He’d already discovered that earlier, but there is a part of him that has been wishing it would renew itself somehow. He wipes sweat off his face. The skin there is so cold and wet like leather left in the rain. 

Maybe if he’s very lucky, she’ll kill him before the pain returns in full.

* * *

Naps are a spiritual ritual for most Purcels, and Enzo likes to honor that tradition by commemorating particularly difficult or meaningful business exchanges. Nearly every planet’s denizens have their own stories of creation and of divine intervention, some smaller like the farmers of Kinyen whose goddess’s powers seem to be relegated to making fertile the fields and wives, and some huge beyond imagining like the Essence of Enzo’s people. The Essence, say Purcel teachings, not only created every mote in existence, but constantly exerts its power on everything. The Essence moves every beat of all hearts and holds together the solid state of every stone. Napping then, is making yourself as little a burden as possible to the god, and shows it great love and respect. Since all of Enzo’s waking life is a burden greater than the average Purcel, his naps feel like small recompense for the deity, but he does his best as a devout follower.

Feeding the Resistance is not profitable, but it feels good in his primary heart to do. He has a good feeling about the young sallow-faced First Order commander too, despite how the rest of the galaxy views him. Enzo believes the Essence devotes much of its time to the life that man lives, which is no doubt why he always looks so harried, so desperately in need of his own sleep, his own time outside of the god’s effort.

He has instructed his servants to add the Mantellian Flutterplume down comforter to his bed and he’s slipped into his wampa fur-lined robe in order to sleep as restfully as possible to best honor the Essence, to thank it for the ability to enact change on such a large scale. As far as he knows, he’s the most ambitious Purcel ever born. 

Enzo raises a goblet filled with a deep purple liquid to his lips at the same moment that a deep rumble shakes the building. His hexagonal eyes dart around the room. The shaking stops quicker than the noise that accompanies it, a booming which echoes with deep reverberations. Lagme, the bodyguard on duty, enters Enzo’s room, weapon ready and alert. His drink and nap forgotten, Enzo bolts to his feet and calls up his head of security on the nearest console.

“We felt it, sir. We are on it,” says Yorst, before Enzo can ask.

“Your best guess, Shield Yorst?”

There’s ten seconds of dead air before Yorst says, “I prefer not to guess, but I would lean towards crash over artillery.” 

A ship crash. Given the minimal amount of air traffic, that would make it poor General Hux’s ship. Enzo spies the small clock on his bedside table. Yes, the timing would work out. Instantly he suspects violence. “Put someone else in charge of obtaining flight paths and scheduled landings and takeoffs for 6 hours before and after…” he stops, not sure what to call what’s happened. It’s too soon to tell. “After the explosion.” Another thought occurs to him that he knows what ship would have most recently left before Hux’s, and that would be the one belonging to the First Order’s greatest nemesis. He feels the guilt in his esophagus, instantly burning with potentially unwarranted blame. “Get me the time that Organa’s ship left orbit. And calculate her return time if she doubled back to Nethic.”

Prylar Enzo gets confirmation of his suspicion while he’s en route to the site of the downed ship. From the backseat of his private hovercraft, he contacts Organa’s ship which is hovering in the stratosphere from where it fired upon Hux’s ship. There is no police force on Nethic; if there was, he would never be able to use it as a base of operations for his business, but there are three ships, two are Enzo’s own, with weapons targeted on Organa’s medium-sized shuttle. He has personnel tracking the larger ship’s orbit, but there isn’t much he can do to keep it from fleeing, should they decide to leave.

General Leia’s face appears on the subspace comm. Gone is the pleasant familiarity she’d worn when they’d met only a day ago; now she is all seriousness. Good, what she’s done is serious business, and he wouldn’t want her approaching this with frivolity. “Prylar Enzo,” she says. 

“You returned to my planet to shoot down a visiting ship. This is hardly a friendly action and I demand an explanation.”

Her already thin lips tighten further. If she is not used to having things demanded of her, then she should practice conversing more with those who run their own little empires. She is not the only royalty in the galaxy; his may have been paved with credits and no actual lineage, but at least his planet still exists. 

“The man on that ship was responsible for the destruction of the Hosnian System,” she says.

Enzo sighs and looks out the window of the hovercraft. He’d thought himself prepared for the sight, but he is nonetheless jarred by seeing the smoking wreck of Hux’s ship smashed into a copse of fine Varlar trees. General Organa is very lucky that this planet is sparsely populated. If any Purcel lives had been lost in the attack, he would have been tempted to personally seek retribution against the teachings of the priests. As it is, he still feels the anger over the murder of the overworked hyperalert young man he’d met with less than a couple hours ago. 

“And what destruction are you responsible for, Organa?” he asks. “Not just today. How many have died because of your actions? Is it only the quantity that makes him worse than you?”

He shouldn’t talk like this to her. She is more powerful than he, strictly from a muscle-perspective, but this blatant disregard of the Essence’s greatest gift is worse than infuriating, it is openly disgusting. 

She sounds tired when she says, “We do what we have to do. I know you understand that, Prylar.” 

“Your words have wisdom, Leia, you should listen to them. You might find that the world has one fewer side than you believe there to be.” 

There are maybe ten people around the crash, a mix of Purcels and Derducians, standing and staring as it smolders. It will fall on Enzo to hire people to clear the debris. This planet is, after all, essentially his, with no formal government to perform public services. The fires inside the ship will snuff out quickly once it runs out of oxygen to fuel it and Nethic air is great at gobbling up oxygen. 

“I hope you know,” he says, “There will be no more trades between us following this incident.”

“A day ago, I would have thought that was a great loss for my people,” says Leia, conveying what she understands to be his double-dealing ways. 

He could correct her, but he sees no point, their business relationship is done and he isn’t worried about sharpening a reputation for neutrality. “I expect that any other future business you have on Nethic be concluded as well. My world has no desire for combat.”

She nods. “We will respect your wishes and depart... after we have investigated the ship.”

A horrified gasp escapes his throat without his intention. “You have some nerve! You want to pick at the bones of your kill? Have I really misjudged you and your people so badly?”

Quickly, she shakes her head, a bit of the old familiarity returning. “No, not like that. It’s the woman we were waiting to rendezvous with. Enzo, I think she might be on the ship or hurt nearby it.”

“I very much doubt that she’s there unless it was without the pilot’s knowledge,” he says.

“That is a distinct possibility,” Leia says. “She… she’s young and hasn’t yet learned that there are places she shouldn’t go.”

Prylar Enzo considers. Leia had seemed awfully worried about her missing resistance member. He’d suspected already that this was the Jakku girl, the one with the Force powers, but this confirms it. He couldn’t imagine the General going this far out of her way for anyone else. “I must… think on this. For now, send one person from your ship to check your rendezvous point again. I not only find it to be unlikely that your friend managed to stow away in the time between your departure and the time of this travesty, but I find it in the poorest of taste for you to rummage through your victim’s goods.”

“And if we don’t find her at that point?”

“Then communicate that with me. And I will send some of my people to help you search for your friend, and only your friend.” What he’s saying in no uncertain terms is that she’s not treasure hunting in that ship, not for information about the First Order, not for ammunition. It’s on his planet and he’ll protect the dead man’s property as he would any of those who meet on this neutral ground. 

“I accept your terms, Prylar. I’ll be in touch.” Her image winks out. 

“This has turned into a regrettable day,” Enzo says to himself. “We don’t often deserve the blessings the Essence gives us, but we have utterly failed it today.”

* * *

“There is no forward docking hatch, is there?” she asks, allowing herself a moment of rest. The metal beneath her is cold when she sits cross-legged in front of the dying general. She doesn’t let go of the beacon, not even for a moment. It’s hard to tell time right now, but she thinks it’s been only ten minutes since she’d turned it on. She thinks it’s working, but there’s no way to know for sure. The only way she’ll know is if and when her friends burst into the ruined ship and save her. When he remains quiet, she presses. “Is there?”

“Was it not worth looking for?”

Any emotions seem to make the pain in her head worse, she tries to push back the rage, tucking it behind what feels like a ridge of brain in her head. “Not if the ship doesn’t have one,” she whispers. “But then, it wouldn’t have made any difference, would it?” Rey asks. “Putting it outside, I mean.”

“Not my area of expertise,” he says. 

She thinks back to her childhood attempt at a beacon. “It wouldn’t have. Either it works or it doesn’t. It’s just… I made something like this before, hoping it’d bring back my parents. I put that in the ground. I guess I thought if I put this in the ground, maybe this time…”

She’s just so tired. It doesn’t matter that she’s rambling about her childhood to this man. What will it matter? Soon he’ll be dead and she’ll either be dead or in a coma. Her vision is blurred now and maybe that’s a blessing. She doesn’t want the last thing she ever sees to be this murderer, even if he’s helped her stay awake.

His seizures are coming more frequently now. Not being able to help him is worse somehow than not being able to help herself. She isn’t used to standing by while others suffer, even if they’re reprehensible.

Unable to stop herself, she allows herself to lay out on the hard floor. She doesn’t even bother to move the debris there before she does. She sighs, luxuriating in the feel, whatever is digging into her side more comfortable than being upright. 

“Probably not the smartest option now,” he says to her. 

She ignores him. This feels so much better, though it makes her eyelids heavier. She thinks of her AT-AT home on Jakku. That had been cold metal but it had been a safe haven, a refuge from the scorching sun and sand, from those that wanted to take advantage of a lone girl in a cesspit. She feels like she’s there, can see her knick-knacks around here. Why had she ever left?

“Scavenger! You must stay awake.”

“Must I?” she asks petulantly, recognizing a voice inside her that she hasn’t heard since she was a child. Little abandoned girls don’t get to be bratty. “Why?”

“Because your friends shot down this ship and they will be here soon to search it.”

“You think they’re just scavengers. Even I’m not a scavenger anymore, not really.”

“They knew I was on this ship,” he tells her. “Or else it would be safe and not smashed to pieces. They also know you’re missing and have been since before we took off. Your friends will take a look to retrieve you or to make sure I didn’t survive.”

Her friends. Leia with her motherly arms. Where had she been when Rey had been growing up so desperately in need of those hugs? Finn with his fast mouth and warm heart. He broke his programming with just that heart alone, because he couldn’t do the things that they wanted him to. Poe. He was new to her but he seemed so dashing and full of bravado. In a small way, he reminded her of Han. 

“Scavenger!”

She hates the evil man’s intrusion into her daydreams. “Shutup!” she hisses. “I’m dreaming.”

“Scavenger! Rey! Did you fight to survive for nothing?”

She didn’t survive for a reason. She survived because there was no other option. There were times she wanted the sand to just swallow her up, but that’s not how things worked. She’s no survivor; just another person living a life. She looks at him. All she sees is the shape of a mass of metal scraps. What would she see if she could see straight? A dying sweat-covered pale soldier yelling at her, begging her to stay awake. “Quiet General. It’s time to sleep.”

She closes her eyes and the galaxy swirls around behind them. She hears the evil man calling to her, but she ignores him, and his voice changes into those she cares about. She hears Finn first, then Han, then many voices combine and she’s overwhelmed by them. She can’t keep up with their words which float around her. She lets herself be lifted by their voices, carried off to a place where time doesn’t exist. She loses herself there. 

* * *

When they find Rey, face coated in dried blood and unconscious, Finn’s first thought is that they are too late. They’d had to wait for Prylar Enzo’s machines to pry open the doors of the ship when droid override hadn’t done the trick. He cries her name and skids to his knees across the ruined floor, grabbing her up into his arms, too distressed to count heartbeats. Instead, he’s putting his breathing masked face up to her nose hoping with everything in him that she’s breathing. “Come on, Rey. You’ve gotta be alive, okay?” He shakes her, though he shouldn’t, because she probably has broken, well who knows what all could be broken if she was in this kite when it folded, but he’s scared and he’s not responding like a trained soldier but a frantic friend. “Poe!”

Poe’s beside him on the floor and he grabs at her wrist feeling for a pulse. Her hands are bloody too, and oily with workshop grease. For too long Poe is quiet as he listens with his fingers for a sign of life. Finally, he says, “Yeah, it’s there. She’s alive.” Poe stands and yells to the rest of the search party which consists of two more from their ship and four native Nethics provided by Enzo, “We need a stretcher over here! We’ve got her, but she’s not doing so great.”

“Rey. Rey, can you hear me?” He cups her face, jostling it, trying to get her to wake up. He notices the dried blood pools in the shells of her ears. “Rey!”

“Sleeping…” says the softest voice he’s ever heard. It’s more like an exhale that happens to form a word. 

“Rey! Poe, she’s awake!” It’s an overstatement, but he’s just thrilled for consciousness. He shouted that pretty loudly with his face inches from hers and she opens her eyes. They roll a lot, like she’s dizzy, and he’s not sure if she sees him. “Hey Rey, it’s me. It’s Finn. We got your signal.”

“My signal,” she repeats. The words don’t mean much to her. She says them again. “My signal…” then recognition. “I made a beacon.”

“Yeah you did. We picked it up.”

“I’m not in a coma.” Then she cries out, her hand thwacking the side of her head. Her mouth hangs open, a grotesque expression of pure suffering, and she wails with the pain. “It hurts! Oh, it hurts!”

The people waiting with the stretcher move into action. They lift her onto it. The relocation doesn’t seem to hurt her, just her head. She holds onto it tightly with both hands as they cover her in a blanket. She sits halfway up which can’t be easy on the flimsy canvas the rebellion uses for their stretchers.

“Finn, the general…”

“She’s waiting on the ship. We’ll get you right to her,” he assures. 

“No! Wait!” she yells at her rescue entourage who had started to carry her out of the ship. She grabs at Finn’s shirt desperately. “Not that general.” Then, she points to a pile of rubble, the one she’d been lying in front of. “Get the general out.” Her voice is raging with intensity and he can tell that every word hurts even before she cries out again, returning the dirty hands to try and hold in her own skull.

“Finn?” asks Trauri, uncertain if they’re allowed to carry her to safety yet or not.

He nods. “Get her back to the ship, we’ll figure out what she’s talking about.” They do so, leaving Finn and Poe behind along with two of Enzo’s men. “The general?” asks Finn toward Poe. It’s possible that whatever damage had been done to her head made her see things. Had she seen Leia here in this mess?.

“She was talking about me.” It actually makes him jump. He hadn’t been expecting a person in all the rubble even after Rey had pointed right there and said there was one. He rushes toward the pile and his eyes scan desperately in the dim red lighting to find the speaker. When he does, it’s jarringly close to him (he’d been maybe a meter away) and jarringly familiar.

Finn’s frown is one for the ages, truly an expression of deep displeasure with a situation. “No, there’s no way she meant you.”

Poe draws near as well, shoulder touching Finn’s. “Well, so it’s true that cockroaches really can live through anything.”

Finn paces, rubbing his hands together as though for warmth. Yeah, it’s a First Order ship that was carrying Hux, but he hadn’t expected to find General Hux still alive, though barely from the look of him, and he definitely hadn’t thought Rey would be requesting that they aid the bastard. He can’t even stand to look at him, but he forces himself to. Hux looks worse than Rey had, sweaty and pale, eyes glowing red and shivering.

He doesn’t notice Poe’s eyes on him, nor the incredulous expression on his face, because he’s too caught up with his own inner turmoil, but they share a moment after Poe asks, “Wait, we’re not obligated to help him. Right? Finn, buddy, she wasn’t telling us to help General Psychopath here, right? I mean, the guy exploded five planets. Surely that’s reason enough to leave him behind?”

Finn doesn’t know. He’s not used to making decisions and while he thinks he’s done a pretty damn good job at learning, he’s not to this level yet, the life-or-death decisions when dealing with one’s enemies. He puppy dog eyes Poe. “I don’t know, man.”

Poe stretches up on his tip toes and tips back his upper body stretches his back, letting out a huge groan. “She really said “get the general out and not “retrieve the General’s small-dicked corpse?””

Finn frowns. Then he whispers, because of all the things no doubt wrong with Hux, hearing doesn’t seem to be one of them, “He doesn’t look like he’s going to make it anyway, right? Chances are we take off the rubble and he’s going to die anyway.”

“Okay.” Poe nods, then responds quietly back, matching Finn’s volume. “Yeah, I follow. We do the right thing and get him off the ship, but he doesn’t pull through because of the extensive damage.”

They nod at each other for a moment, each one picking up what the other is saying.

“What if he lives?” asks Poe, then, when Finn has no answer, he turns to the Prylar’s lackeys. “Uh, we’ve got another survivor, I guess. Can that machine outside get this shit off him?”

General Hux closes his eyes, perhaps from relief or maybe choosing this moment to die. Finn’s hopes for the latter get dashed quickly enough when he opens them again. “You’re lucky.” he says, leaning down to his former commanding officer, “We don’t put as little effort into saving people as you do.”


	2. Chapter 2

Finn has seen Rey sleep before. She sleeps on her side, back to a wall, sometimes with her hand reaching out to her staff, touching it even, on guard in the deepest parts of her brain. She sleeps lightly, the slightest noise providing impetus to open her eyes and have a look around. That’s how she sleeps naturally, but the past few hours he’s been watching over Rey in an artificially unconscious state. So whereas he tends to think she looks worried with furrowed brow and tight-pressed lips, right now, she looks like a hilarious exaggeration of a sleeping person, on her back, mouth open wide with a bit of saliva tinging the corners of chapped lips, and almost, though not quite snoring. 

Immediately following her surgery, he’d fetched her things from the Falcon which Poe had flown up from the surface of Nethic. He knows that she’ll want them around when she wakes up. Her staff is missing, which she will be distraught to learn. She doesn’t have much, which makes what she does have that much more important. He also has put some water next to the unappetizing crackers that Trauri placed on the wall mounted table beside the infirmary bed. 

Since then he’s just been passing the time looking at various things (news articles, vacation recommendations, and medical information about head injuries) on a datapad given to him by one of Leia’s assistants. They told him that the surgery went well, that her vital signs are strong (which he can now see for himself on the mobile monitors), and that they won’t know the full impact of the crash on her mental faculties for a while. He has a bad feeling that he wants to write off as being overly protective, but something about the phrase “mental faculties” scares him. 

When Rey coughs, he almost drops the datapad. Her eyes, half-lidded, see him then see past him. 

“Rey!” He stands up, drops the datapad where his ass was. “Hey, how are you doing?”

Her eyes close again, but she replies. “I’m doing… I don’t know how I’m doing.” Then an incoherent stream of mumbling makes its way from her nearly immobile lips.

“What?” he asks.

“That’s what I said,” she answers. Her eyelashes bat a little bit and then shut tight. “I’m not feeling normal.”

“But you’re okay. You hit your head.”

Rey’s smile is askew, as though the muscles are still under anesthesia too. “I did?” Why did I do that?”

He reaches out his hand and strokes her arm. She doesn’t react, positively or negatively, to the touch. Her tone is so light and confused; if he heard it from another room, he wouldn’t recognize it as Rey’s. It sounds childish, and while he’s seen earnestness in her, and of course the blinding overall goodness in her, she has a worldly quality that isn’t present right at this moment.

“Did you know that I met Han Solo?” she asks.

Finn laughs, caught genuinely by surprise. She joins in too, but then she looks around with fully wide eyes, just for a second, and asks, “Was I just laughing?” The seeming alertness leaves her as she begins to laugh again, softer this time.

“Oh man, this is what you’re like on drugs, huh?” he says. 

“Am I on drugs?”

“Oh yeah, you are. You’re doing good though. You made it through surgery and you handled it like the badass everyone knows you are.”

“Did I need surgery?” She moves her bandaged head a bit, as though perhaps there’s someone on the other side of her bed with whom she’s also having a conversation. 

Finn is enjoying this more than he should. He speaks to her with the fake enthusiasm of talking to a kid. “You certainly did!”

“Perhaps I should have another!” she proclaims.

“I think one will do,” says a voice behind Finn. It’s Leia. Her arrival in any room adds gravitas. Finn very nearly feels the urge to salute, a deeply ingrained response to the arrival of someone so obviously his superior. Instead, he keeps his hand on Rey’s arm, though his thumb stops stroking.

Leia takes her place beside Finn and greets the patient. “Hello, Rey. How are you feeling?”

“I met you too!” says Rey, bursting with dopey excitement that doesn’t extend to the rest of her floppy body. “Would you say that you’re my friend?”

Leia gives Finn a look. “Is that just left over from the surgery or did they give her more painkillers?”

Finn shakes his head. “Just the anesthesia. Trauri will give her medication when she needs it. I should probably let her know that she’s awake.”

“Leia,” says Rey in a very serious tone. “I wish that we could all be on drugs more often.” She slaps lightly at Finn’s hand in a gesture of camaraderie. 

Even Leia can’t help but smile, but she does tell Finn before he leaves that, “Trauri should probably hold off on the painkillers for now.”

* * *

Rey doesn’t remember much of the first day of her recovery. The events are a sort of montage in her head: her mouth feeling dry, complaining about her headache, complaining about not being able to feel the Force, Leia holding her hand, Finn holding her hand, and nightmares. Through the nightmares, she’d relived the crash over and over, the crash as it had happened, and the crash as it hadn’t: her body thrown about like trash caught in a dust devil, her body caught underneath rubble, the general yelling that she must fight, the general telling her that she wouldn’t live and encouraging her to give up, assembling the beacon, breaking the beacon in a rage that it wouldn’t bring her parents to the crash site, the crunch of something colliding with her head, and throughout them all, the perpetual klaxxon ringing.

Still, she’d needed sleep and had embraced it, bad dreams and all. She’d simply been too exhausted to want anything else.

Finn’s sitting with her in the dim room, eyes doing their side-to-side shift as he reads the datapad. He’s been here a while, she thinks, because she doesn’t remember coming to without him being there. Her head is throbbing again. Rey now associates Trauri with that pain, an unfair consequence of nursing. She thinks she called out to her for more meds while she was in her blurred mosaic of time. “Is it time for another dose?” she asks Finn.

He startles, though her voice had been soft. He’s next to her in a heartbeat, looking down at her with concern in his eyes as he scans her. “I can find out. Hurt pretty bad?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she says. 

“I’ll go get her. You wait here.”

It’s not a joke, just a reflexive command, but she finds it funny, even if her sense of humor is crushed beneath the pain in her head.

She knows nothing of her prognosis nor what they’ve done to her. She can feel the bandages on her head, that’s no surprise, and she has fluids being pumped into her, though her mouth still feels as dry as it did on Jakku. She reaches out for the little container of water from which she’d been taking occasional sips. Her arm shakes, but she makes it, getting the water into her mouth without spilling a drop. It’s stagnant, but wet. 

Oh, she’s already done with this recovery process. Still, it’s a lot easier with others to fetch her things like painkillers and glasses of water. If this had happened to her on Jakku, she would have died, no doubt. Her reliance on her new friends has been scary and extrinsic, but it has paid off. She’s not used to owing her life to anyone.

The door whooshes back open and Finn with an apologetic smile appears. “She says she’ll be here in about a half an hour with more drugs for you.”

It’ll be a long half hour. Well, she has enough questions for Finn to kill the bulk of that.

“What did the doctors do?” she asks. Her voice sounds so much smaller than it usually does, and not just because she’s whispering. Her body is weak, even just the sounds that come from her.

“You don’t remember any of what I told you before?” he asks. “Okay okay! It’s fine. I’ll tell you again.” She has a head injury! There is only so much that she can be expected to remember. “Doctor Winchina put some nanodroids in your head to fix up the connections up there.”

“Nanodroids!” Rey gasps, surprised. She’d heard of them, but they were rare, even for rich people from worlds like Naboo. 

Finn smiles. “Yeah, you had little robots like BB8 fixing your brain.”

She pictures lots of little BB8s rummaging through her thoughts and memories; it pleases her. All the years she’s spent repairing droids and finally they’d done her the same service. She wishes she could thank them as she does when BB8 helps her out.

“And then he put your skull back together. It was smashed up pretty bad on this side,” he points to his own head at the location where she must have taken the most direct collision. “But he’s got it all fixed up. You probably don’t even need the bandages. I think that’s mostly to keep the gloop from getting dirt in it.” By gloop she takes him to mean bacta.

“Did he say my connection to the Force will come back when the headaches are gone? Did I tell him that I can’t?”

His smile fades and he reaches for her, his hand rubbing her forearm. “They don’t know. When you told him that you couldn’t feel anyone through the Force, he said that they don’t know how the Force works. I kinda got the impression he didn’t think it was a real thing.”

She can hardly judge the doctor; she’d always thought the Force was a myth before she was able to connect with it. Now she can’t imagine any element of her being more important. The Force had saved her on Starkiller Base, true, but she has relied on it for thousands of other things since that day. “Do they know if there will be long-term effects?”

“Not yet. They said time will tell. But, you seem to follow what I’m saying okay.”

“Though I can’t remember that you’ve said it before.”

Finn nods. “Your memories got some holes. Last time we talked, you still didn’t remember how you got on the ship.”

It hurts to put too much thought into it right now, but she remembers. The gap she’d had in her memory while on board the First Order ship has been filled in and she exhales with relief. “No, I do remember.”

“You do?” he asks, excited. He always shares in her joys, small or large, as she had imagined a friend would. Now, being surrounded by people, she’s beginning to see how rare that kind of connection truly is. A woman is lucky to find two or three friends that she can rely on when things are at their worst. She has made many friends, but they are a more superficial connection, not the strong filial bond that she feels with Finn or the tentatively maternal bond she has with Leia. 

“When I got to the meeting point, instead of General Leia’s ship, I saw General Hux’s. I didn’t recognize it, but it felt… it felt like the First Order, like there was something not right about it being there. Then, I saw Hux returning to his ship. He was wearing a mask but I could still see his face and I recognized him from the transmission. I sent the message.” Even now the memories feel segmented, like watching a holo with corrupted data. Maybe that was how the nandroids worked; they could repair the circuitry but there would be welding gaps that data needed to jump over. “I had just sent Leia the message before one of the First Order officers grabbed me. Before I even saw them, they tore off my breathing mask.”

Finn looks frightened though he knows that she survived the encounter. He didn’t know this part of the tale. “I had to hold my breath. I think I drew upon the Force somehow.” She pauses remembering the terror, but again secondarily, if one can experience an emotion that way. “They dragged me on board the ship and I had to decide whether or not to fight them. I needed the air, so I let them take me prisoner.” 

Her staff, she realizes, is probably still on that poison planet. It’s nearly as hard to come by sturdy wood on Jakku as it is in space, but eventually, it can be replaced. If her years as a junker have taught her nothing, it’s just how easy most things are to replace. Losing the staff is unfortunate, but a welcome trade for her life.

“And then you were on board when we shot it down.”

She blanches, her slowed mind not having made the connection. “You did! You shot the ship down!”

“We didn’t know you were on it,” says Finn, unnecessarily. 

“You shot it from low orbit?” He nods. “General Hux had given the order to take off. I don’t think he knew what to do about me being there. He didn’t… it seemed that he didn’t want me as a prisoner, like they’d messed up his plans by capturing me.”

“Probably knew you could take him in a fight,” suggests Finn. 

Rey remains silent, unconvinced of that explanation. He hadn’t wanted his officers to grab her. She’d felt a near panic from him about the situation though he had only looked perturbed. “Were you able to... did Hux survive?”

Finn’s lips become a solid flat unenthusiastic line. “Oh yeah, he made it.” She feels herself smile, just a touch, and she feels slightly happy for him, that he didn’t die trapped on the planet, left all alone and discarded like her staff. “Rey, I don’t understand why you even let us know. We could have left him there.”

“He kept me awake.” At his eyebrow raise, she adds, “He tried, anyway. He told me you’d be coming for me.”

Finn shakes his head, incredulous. “Yeah, well now thanks to you, he’s resting comfortably down the hall.”

“Would you rather have left him to die down there?” she asks loudly, immediately wincing at the pain that shoots through her head. Where is Trauri with those meds? Surely it’s been a half hour.

“Yes, yes I would.”

She doesn’t believe that of him, even with the words coming out of his mouth. The Finn she knows would never bemoan someone’s survival, even if that someone is irredeemably despicable. But, she has to remember that she wasn’t the one who was abducted by an evil organization, forced to fight under a banner not their own. Finn has more reason to hate General Hux than she does, like those who lost family to his weapon do. Still, she’s glad that Finn fought past his own resentment long enough to save a life, even one not worth sparing. It shows the strength of his character. He may think that he’s unhappy about it now, but there’s something inside of him that knows what the right thing to do was, and she’s glad that he didn’t tarnish the glow of his goodness with an act of petty vengeance. 

“You know now the General’s got to…. General Leia, I mean… is going to have to execute him anyway. If we’d just left him there, then she wouldn’t have to make that call. All we did was make things harder for the people here.”

“It was the right thing to do,” she says stubbornly.

He makes a face. They sit in silence for a few moments. They don’t tend to squabble; that tends to be more of Rey and Poe’s thing. Finn freaks out about things, but then goes along anyway, internalizing his doubts and objections. That’s remnants of his upbringing. Already she’s seen him improving his assertiveness, finding where his lines are, which things to fight for and which things to leave be. She’s nothing short of amazed by her friend’s growth as a well-rounded person rather than a stormtrooper. 

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he says, finally, the anger leaving him. 

She doesn’t feel okay. Her head is pounding and it’s hard to concentrate, even on this conversation which means so much to her. She wonders if they’ll have to have it again, if she’ll keep forgetting the details of why she was on the ship and why there are bandages looping her head. She’s worried about her disconnection from the Force. It’ll probably come back once it doesn’t feel like a Luggabeast has just trampled through her brain, but that doesn’t mean she’s not scared that it won’t. “I’m alive,” she corrects. “I think it’ll be awhile before I feel okay.” It’s easy to be honest with Finn.

“You know, you’re the life of the party when you’re coming out of anesthesia…” he says with a twinkle in his eye. 

“Oh no…” she says, simultaneously dreading and awaiting the story.

* * *

Armitage Hux is a survivor. He’d survived Brendol. He’d survived the academy. He had survived the destruction of an entire planet. Now, by only the merest of technicalities, he’s alive after his ship was shot down by the enemy. Oh, he’s breathing and his heart is beating, but his legs are crippled and he’s a prisoner of war; not exactly the ideal situation. He’s out of the bacta tank, which his captors were generous enough to have tossed him into following extensive surgery. Being dried off and placed in a bed brought him no small relief at the time, but in comparison to the immediate future - impending interrogations, possible execution, possible lifelong incarceration, and, of course, the continued paralysis of his lower body - it seems like a rather paltry positive. 

Hux knows that the First Order doesn’t treat their prisoners this well. He would never personally authorize a surgical droid, let alone a living, breathing surgeon to repair a broken captive. That they can spare the effort and expense to do so makes him suspect that the rebels are doing better than reports have indicated. Well, no matter. He is not here to collect information and doing so serves him no benefit. The option to stay safely hidden behind Prylar Enzo, a sort of living intelligence hub with a reputation for discretion whom Hux has had the misfortune of learning firsthand makes grievous misjudgements of scheduling, is gone. It’s better to have been caught by the rebellion than the First Order or Kylo Ren who already abuses him without provocation, who treats him like a voodoo doll, like he thinks breaking Hux’s nose will bring his precious scavenger back to him.

He has to give that scavenger credit and now he better understands Ren’s obsession. The woman is powerful even without any force magic. Intellect can be just as deadly as the fiercest arm, a tenet that has served him well for most of his life, though Hux is intimately aware that both have their time and place. Still, he would have enjoyed witnessing first hand her taking the lightsaber to Ren’s face on Ilum and not just appreciating the signature she left behind

He’s secured to an oblong rod which juts horizontally from the wall and loops above the bed via retracting chains that connect to two autonomous restraint cuffs. The chains’ maximum distance are really quite long, allowing him to sleep in any comfortable position (if comfort was an option following what he’d been through) as well as providing access to a small table with water and crackers and to a vacc tube for bodily processes. The cuffs glow blue, electronics inside providing a constant monitoring feedback to his captors. In contrast to the biomonitors are the archaic bodyguards who occasionally check in on him from the ever-open door. They never step into the room, but lean past the frame of the doorway to visually confirm his continued imprisonment status. The medical personnel, or volunteers, he supposes, since he doubts that the rebellion has a payroll, perform their duties quickly and with side glances. He’s a Kath hound in a nest of Wolly rats, and even if he’s currently incapable of hurting them, he has before and they know it. 

So, when he receives his first non-medical visitor, it’s with surprise, doubly so for who it is. He hears words exchanged in the hallway, but spoken low, and he’s assuming the worst, because why wouldn’t he, but instead of an executioner, a gloating force-wielding former princess, it’s the scavenger. 

Rey is standing in the doorway with an abundance of beige wrappings kept in place on her fragile skull with tiny metal teeth. She’s leaning heavily on a cane with a base of four prongs. Her thin but strong body is draped in an oversized bleach white gown that ties at the side. She’s cleaned up, no more blood, but she doesn’t exactly scream healthy. 

“Nice hat,” says Hux.

She’s confused by his comment and her hand goes up to the bandages. The joke clicks and she continues into the room, passing through the imaginary barrier of protection between the rest of the ship and the evil genocidaire. She leans with her full body against a wall. She looks worn out. “Your room is farther than I’d expected.”

Having not been outside of his combination cell and recovery room, he’ll have to take her word for it. 

“World’s spinning…” 

This is familiar in the worst way. “Scavenger, perhaps you should have stayed in your bed.” If she swoons in here, will they assume he’s found some way to harm her, even with his severed spine and cuffed wrists? Irrelevant to be worried about getting in trouble now, yet if working with Kylo Ren has taught him nothing, it’s that things can always get worse. 

“No, I’m okay. Just need a minute.” She takes deliberate slow breaths. “May I sit?” she asks, pointing to the bed in which he’s currently lying. For an awful second, he tries to move his legs to give her room. She’ll have to make her own space then. He nods to her. Luckily, there’s enough space for her insignificant backside and his useless legs. If she touches them, he doesn’t know. 

Hux catches the quick peek from the guard, but he doesn’t think Rey sees it, because she’s too caught up in calming her head. The guard leans back upright, out of view again. Good, for once Hux is glad that he’s being watched. They’ll know he didn’t harm the girl. He watches as she tries to steady herself. It’s hard to believe such a frail thing bested Kylo Ren, leaving him for dead on an exploding planet. He’s had people underestimate him over the years too, mistaking fastidiousness for weakness. 

“Thank you,” she says. 

“Any time.” He doesn’t know what else to say.

“I have such a headache right now.”

“Unsurprising.” He looks again at the bandages. “Do they expect that everything is… alright up there?”

She eyes him, worried she’s being insulted, but seeing nothing but earnestness in him, she answers. “They don’t know yet. I can remember things now… things I couldn’t on your ship.”

“The Antioch,” he says. He’s less fond of the ship now that he’s laid beneath it. 

“When I was on board, I couldn’t remember how I got there.”

He frowns. It’s too bad she does know now. It was an unfortunate incident, the whole thing. He trusted Sergeant Wicnos enough to keep his mouth shut about the jaunt down to Nethic for “information,” but taking someone who wasn’t a stormtrooper was a mistake. A stormtrooper would never have grabbed the girl without orders, even if one was smart enough to recognize her. 

She waits for him to say something but he has nothing to add. Perhaps she’s waiting for an apology. He certainly hadn’t been responsible for her abduction and the two who were are probably buried beneath Nethic soil. He won’t apologize just because she needs to hear it. 

“It’s hard to think, though, because of the pain.”

“And walking long distances makes you dizzy.”

She gives a rueful half smile. “Well, I just found that out.” 

“I imagine your doctor probably warned you about something like that being likely to occur.” 

The smile vanishes. Hux wonders whether it’s the doctor herself or the advice that she’s unhappy with. “Probably.” 

“Has the world stopped spinning?” he asks after another lull in their conversation. He’s not afraid of silence like so many people seem to be; he’s just noticing that her eyes are focusing better and her breathing has become more natural.

“Yeah,” she says. Rey draws up one knee to her chest, pulling the gown over it like a tent, the cane leaning against the bed. This simple action, one he’ll never again perform darkens his mood and his thoughts which had been so beautifully distracted with this conundrum of a person. “Thank you… for helping me… on the ship.”

“I think your memory is still playing tricks on you. You were the one who saved my life. I would consider myself indebted to you, but I fear I have nothing to offer as means of repayment.”

“I was just doing what was right,” she replies. He gets the impression that she’s had to tell herself that more than once. The words have a mantra-like quality to them.

“Ah, see, that’s where you made an error. ‘The Right Thing’ is what people call something they want to do that is so foolish that they must concoct reasons why they should.” 

Her bafflement pleases him. Let her think that over. These Resistance fighters that she’s surrounding herself with may have her head all puffed up on martyrdom and cause-rallying, but there’s really very rarely a difference between the pronouns us and them. 

“I don’t think I would understand that even if my brain didn’t feel like it was trying to burst out of my head.” She rubs her hands in little circles on her forehead. 

“Perhaps the days following a head injury are not an ideal time for moral debates.” 

“Perhaps I should listen to the doctor’s advice and return to my room,” she says. “Though I don’t actually remember talking to him, I think I have.”

That must be a strange sensation. He probably could use a bit more amnesia than he’s got, might make him feel less like he wishes he’d been snuffed out as easily as Wicnos. 

When she gets up, she looks sturdier, though he’s sure that will change on the long walk back. Surely that guard outside could spare a few minutes of his staring at the crippled and tethered prisoner to escort her back. He considers mentioning it to her, but he assumes that she wouldn’t listen anyway.

Her eyes catch his and there’s a sweetness that he can see there when she again says, “Thank you.” She turns then, before he can object since he’s done nothing that could earn any gratitude from her, and barely using her cane, she starts towards the door. She stops, though, at the frame, “May I come again?”

“I’m in no position to refuse you,” he says, bewildered by the request. 

In her absence, he runs the conversation over and over again. He wonders why he sounds like such a prat, trying to pick apart her reasons for having helped him like an ungrateful child. Her kindness only exaggerates his behavior, makes him resolve to attempt more civility in their future interactions. 

* * *

He’s slept seven times before someone comes to talk with him in a more official capacity, which he guesses to be maybe four days, a good deal longer to recover than he’d have given a man in his position. He listens as the man exchanges short pleasantries with the guard outside his door. Before his visitor even enters the room, Hux recognizes Cogtho Zanbre from First Order intelligence reports. He is a member of the Resistance High Command, a New Republic convert who bought his way in with his family’s wealth. Quarrens, as Zanbre is, love playing in politics, though most stick to their own civil issues; the sharing of their planet with their evolutionary cousins provides them ample opportunity for propagandizing, backstabbing, and other general political pursuits. His platform, as Hux understands it, is a moral one. Hux never did have much patience for the righteous. 

“Greetings Former General Hux,” says Zanbre, the tentacles around his mouth wiggling with his words.

Hux doesn’t allow the frown that forms in his head to touch his lips. So that’s how this is going to start out, a lording of power. Those with the most power rarely have cause to brag about it. Instead of revealing that he is fully aware of who the other man is, and feeding the already sizable ego that has stepped into the room, Hux allows the braggart to introduce himself. “I am Cogtho Zanbre of the Resistance High Command, seat member of the Quarren Interspecies Coalition, and Head Linguistics Professor with a focus on Galactic Basic at the Semiaquatic School of Greater Nosso.”

Hux thinks that it’s amazing that Zanbre finds time to pester prisoners of war since he’s so occupied adding titles to his name. Aloud, he says with obvious disdain, “Pleasure to make your acquaintance. You’ll forgive me if I don’t offer a handshake.” Hux raises his arm indicating the chain, though it could easily extend for the purpose.

Zanbre may suspect mockery, but he is undoubtedly unable to comprehend someone failing to be humbled by his credentials. “A needless human gesture anyway,” he offers, deciding to take Hux’s words at face value. “I wanted to discuss the circumstances that led to your capture. Would you be… amenable to that?”

He nods, “Of course.” 

The Quarren actually pulls up a small rolling chair that the nursing staff infrequently use while recording vitals on their datapads. Well now they must really be settling in for a conversation, Hux thinks. Must everything the rebellion does be so backwards? He would never pull up a chair during an enemy’s interrogation as though they were about to have tea together. 

“You had a meeting scheduled with Prylar Enzo.”

Hux doesn’t know how much Enzo has revealed. One of Enzo’s contacts had shot down another of his contacts within visual range of his small palace moments after having met with one of the parties. The Prylar must have gone into reputation recovery mode which could mean anything from protecting the reason for Hux’s presence with a web of elaborate lies to confessing all the details of their meeting. There’s no way to know. He can’t just wait until he’s back on board the Finalizer to arrange for another meeting, not that he would anyway, seeing how the last one went. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Hux isn’t thinking twelve steps ahead as he always does. This is still a game of Dejarik, but he feels disinclined to worry about future moves and not because of his secret piece, but because he feels disinclined to play at all. “I did, yes.”

“Was that meeting completed or did we happen to interrupt it?” There’s a smarmy cheer to Zanbre’s voice here which should contradict that by an interruption he means the near ending of Hux’s life. 

Hux could outsmarm him any day of the week. “Oh, the meeting went off without a hitch,” he says and it’s true enough regardless of what the next couple of hours were like.

“What would you say was the primary purpose of that conversation?”

“Well, I wasn’t seeking out Prylar Enzo for fashion tips.” He’s not truly being evasive. He just feels obstinate. There’s no reason not to be. This isn’t a superior officer and he’s already in as much trouble as he can be. The time to play things close to the vest seems to have expired the moment that his crew dragged a girl with magic powers on board the Antioch. This new found nihilism is a rush and he imagines this is one of the few times in Cogtho Zanbre’s life that someone has enjoyed having a conversation with him. It feels too good to be this unworried about self-interest; he should have tried this years ago. 

“And what information were you seeking, if not clothing advice?”

Hux’s shoulders relax back into the pillows behind him. Yes, they’d given him pillows, no less than five of them. Comfort for their prisoner. Backwards. 

He corrects Zanbre, and he can hear his own smug satisfaction in the words. “Oh no, I was the one offering information. You see, I am a Resistance informant.” 

The pompous windbag freezes, but briefly. “We were told this by Enzo, of course, but we find it to be… unlikely.” Zanbre’s tentacles wiggle less when lies. He’s guarding his words too, speaking slowly, as though he doesn’t want to reveal too much. For a professional politician coming from a line of wealthy landowners, he’s not very good at this part. It’s probably those pesky morals crippling his hereditary deceptiveness.

“Understandable, but I do have proof.” It occurs to him that he might not actually have evidence. He’s in a gown right now and he’s not seen his own clothes since his capture. If the Resistance trashed his things, then he won’t have any proof. In that case, he won’t need to play any games, won’t need to try and wield any leverage. Even so, it makes his heart speed up to think of the missing items; he could see the change if he was to glance at the monitor. Instead, he keeps his face unenthusiastic, as though he’s just waiting for caf to brew.

“Your proof will have to be something extraordinary for us to believe that a man with your hist....”

Hux interrupts, “I’m not sure how extraordinary it is, but it is tangible. Believe me or don’t, Zanbre, it hardly matters. But, if you want proof, you’ll need to bring me my clothes.”

It takes minutes of blustering and hawing for Zanbre to rise from the little rolling chair and seek out assistance in producing Hux’s presumably blood-soaked attire. While he waits, Hux stares at his toes and tries to make them move. No luck there. He may have to give in and ask them for something to read while lying here. From what he’s seen, they’ll be hospitable enough to grant his request. There’s only so long he can just sit around with a head full of pity and days full of empty minutes. Perhaps after he proves that he is a spy. Hux finds the word itself silly, too romantic. 

A slender elegant woman appears with a transparent bag full of cloth which she holds tightly to her chest. She dips her chin down at him. “We already scanned the things you were wearing.” 

“And you found only blood?” he asks.

She stares at him, unprovoked by his sass. Hux recognizes Holdo from the purple of her hair, but her intelligence pictures didn’t convey the sense of presence she has. He finds her intimidating which is not a feat easily accomplished. She reminds him, a bit, of old recordings of Mon Mothma. “Where would I find it?”

She knows what he has. Good. “Left boot. Cluystium lining which blocks most handheld scanners.”

She sets the bag down on the extendable wall table. She reaches behind her and a long blade appears in her hands. She slices down through the clear material, a slight sigh of air filing the formerly vacuumed inside. There is blood, but it’s dried, on everything she pulls out. She first uncovers the right boot, but the left is just behind in the jumble. He’d dressed in civilian clothes that day, not wanting to call attention to his First Order affiliation. He doesn’t have many of them, well, he didn’t have many. Now he has none. 

“Cluystium is highly carcinogenic,” she speaks the words like she’s reading a warning label on the boot instead of studying the heel, seeking out the mechanism to unlock it. 

He responds at the same time the boot heel clicks open. “I find that to be a less dangerous consequence of espionage.” She pulls out the roughly 5 cm long rod and looks at it, then him, with displeasure. “Getting shot down by the group you’re aiding, now that’s risky. It could leave you paralyzed from the waist down.”

Her hair is up but some lavender-hued wisps float around her face. Her eyes burrow into his brain and, if he wasn’t used to feeling Ren’s prying mental fingers there, he’d suspect that she was using the Force on him. But neither she nor Hux have telepathic abilities, just a keen attention to detail. “You’ll try and use this to evade punishment for what you did to those planets.” She sets the boot back into the bag, the device remains tight in the grip of her hand while she completes the task. “It’s not enough.”

He doesn’t understand how he can be so afraid and so welcoming of his own death at the same moment. “I’m glad the choice isn’t in my hands,” he says honestly. He doesn’t know what he would pick. Rotting in a cell as his hair turns grey and his muscles atrophy from disuse has as little appeal as being strapped to a bed like this one and injected with a poison. Even in this best case scenario, being released, there is nowhere he could go, a traitor to his people and a monster to the rest of the galaxy. 

Holdo takes the bag of his former belongings and the device he was given to weaken Kylo Ren and leaves without saying another word. Let the burden be hers, then. For now, Hux need only allow his bones to mend and to deny the despair which seeks to crawl into them.

* * *

  
  


The rumor mill has been churning, as it does, and it's kept Poe pretty well supplied with a stream of speculation about their prisoner and how his capture relates to dark side boogeyman Kylo Ren. Poe, for his part, hasn’t been saying a damn word though he knows everything, and he’s continually surprised that people are still willing to bring up conjectures with him when his proximity to General Leia and the incident in question should clue people in that he knows whether they're right or wrong. Poe’s always had a way about him that encourages people to confide in him. He’s strengthened that ability over the years, adopted non-judgmental attitudes on the outside even when he’s totally judging on the inside, kept his mouth shut and listened, like really listening and not just hearing, and never offered up advice because people don’t actually want a new perspective, just someone to accept them regardless of what stupid decisions they make. 

The facts are sparse: the fiend responsible for the Hosnian Cataclysm is being treated for severe injuries following their attack on a ship on Nethic. Rey was extracted, injured, from the same ship. Was Kylo Ren killed in the attack? They say that no reports have come in regarding any Kylo Ren sightings in the days since the attack. Had Leia given the command to shoot down the ship knowing that Rey was on board? They say that tensions have run high between the two women since Rey had let Han Solo die. Had the evil First Order general switched sides, been promised clemency only to be betrayed? They say Supreme Leader Snoke and Kylo Ren treat him as only a lap dog and that he chaffs under their command. Most salaciously, had Rey seduced General Hux, lured him to rendezvous on Nethic so that General Leia could capture him? They say that between her jedi mind powers and her beauty, none could resist her.

Basically, the they-sayers watch too many holodramas. 

Well, now they’ll be able to have at least some of their questions answered, and the small crowd that’s gathered for the general’s speech knows it. It’s not even close to the full ship’s complement in this debriefing, but her words will spread around regardless, hopefully without the ripple effect of gossipy gap-filling, but he wouldn’t hold his breath.

Poe isn’t sure how much General Leia will reveal. He looks around the room, finally spotting Rey, the accused seductress herself, along the back wall. She’s got a wool cap pulled down low on her head, covering even her eyebrows. She’s trying to get lost in the crowd. If he hadn't been specifically looking for her, he’d have just ignored her. He heads her direction. Even without her powers, she picks up his presence long before he pulls up beside her. She seems uneasy, her hands grabbing opposite elbows in a light self-hug. 

“Good to have you back with us,” he whispers to her, flashing her a slight supportive smile. 

She rubs her temple and whispers back, “I’m not yet… not all the way.”

“Yeah, I’d heard something about that,” he says with a nod. “Something about the bump to the noggin?” 

She doesn’t respond. He supposes if he had magic powers, he’d be pretty unhappy with losing them too, even if it was probably just temporary. “Well, at least you’re faring better than your crash mate.”

Next to Leia, in the center of the room, Finn’s all impatient, fists clenching and unclenching. He’s still not used to having eyes on him, to people being able to straight up see his face. Poe’s jacket suits him much better than the brainwashed bubble wrap ensemble he’d been sporting when they’d first met. It actually is surprising how good it looks on him, like he’d been born to be a rebel. For all they know, he had been. The First Order must have documents of where Finn’s family is, (bureaucratic types love shit like that), but they haven’t been able to get their greedy Resistance mitts on them yet. When Finn’s eyes finally meet his, Poe gives him a wink. There’s only the slightest of lip twitches to indicate that he’d noticed, but it’s enough. Poe’s good at reading people’s body language; probably too good at it, some might say.

“What do you mean?”

Rey, beside him, is white as a sheet suddenly and her eyes are piercing, trying to read into his soul. 

“Huh?” he asks.

“Has something happened to…” she looks around at the crowd and lowers her voice further, “To the other general?”

Huh. Well, that’s an unexpected reaction. She looks worried. Did she think they were torturing him for information or something? She hasn’t been part of the movement for long but surely she’s been among them long enough that she wouldn’t think them capable of that, even if some people really really deserved it, pasty genocidal prisoners absolutely included. 

“Thank you for gathering,” says General Leia from the center point of everyone’s focus. “I’m sure you’ve all been wondering about…” 

Poe misses the next thing she says because Rey’s hand is on his arm and he looks at her insistent face. She’s demanding an answer, an explanation for his offhand remark. He leans toward her ear, close to her round cheeks, and whispers, “He’s paralyzed from the waist-down. The docs aren’t sure they can fix him.”

He watches her face for a moment before turning his attention back to Leia, just to make sure that she switches over her thinking from ‘these rebels are performing unspeakable acts of torture while we stand around’ to ‘these rebels are trying to help out a maniac who absolutely deserved to die underneath bits of First Order spacecraft.’ He’s not sure that he sees what he’s hoping for, but there's some sort of mental processing going on under the fluffy cap.

“Yes,” says Leia. “it was a First Order ship that we shot down. Only three First Order soldiers were found aboard, including General Hux, Sergeant Wicnos, and an unidentified stormtrooper…”

A hand again distracts him from the debriefing.. “Is he still in Medbay 16?”

“What? Really?” he whisper-yells. That draws some attention from the people closest to them. It doesn’t help that most of the room is looking at Rey now anyway, since Leia has probably just gotten to the bit about Rey being on the ship they shot down. A quick side glance at the troublemaker beside him assures him that she also feels embarrassed and she retracts her demanding hand, like a kid with her hand in the cookie jar. 

Finn’s glaring at Poe. Like he deserves that! Poe glares back. He points with both his index fingers down to her woolen hatted head to identify the real cause of the disturbance. 

“Rey was taken captive aboard the ship just after sending us a message that General Hux was on Nethic. She acted quickly, looking out for the interest of the Resistance over her own personal safety.” Leia nods at Rey. “And we are very glad to have her back in one piece.”

Poe whispers down, while keeping the rest of his face on Leia. “How do you know where he’s being kept?”

“I visited him, but he didn’t tell me…” The quietest whisper comes from her lips. 

“Why would you do that?” he hisses. 

Leia, speaking louder, obviously aware that her wing commander and padawan aren’t paying attention. “We have also recovered General Hux, whom you will remember as the face the First Order wore on the day that the Starkiller weapon was fired.”

There is commotion over this, as Poe would have expected, since he’d been the one to give the order to rescue the bastard and even he can’t believe it. 

“No one who survived that day will be able to forget that face,” says Leia gravely. “Nor forget what role he played in the deaths of over one trillion beings.”

Poe sneaks a peek at Rey. She’s pressing three fingertips to her lower lip and thinking furiously. He’s heard the expression “see the wheels turning,” and if it’s ever successfully applied to anyone, it’s her now. He doesn’t have force powers, so he can’t just read her mind and find out what’s going on in there. He’ll find out later. Or, more likely, he’ll send Finn to find out later and report back to him. They haven’t formed the easy attachment that the former stormtrooper and former scavenger have. Poe thinks she likes him well enough, but they do tend to argue about things more often and when she’s discouraged, she always favors Finn to cheer her.

“However, much like all of us, there is more to him than outward appearances. We have good reason to believe that in recent months, General Hux has been serving as an informant for the Resistance.”

Poe can feel his eyebrows travel up past his hairline, then as quickly come together, a smash of forehead. It practically makes a whip sound. “What?” he asks, though his exclamation is lost to the room full of noise. It’s probably the most spoken word at that moment, really.

His brain does a rapid fire line of thinking. Hux on the planet. He had to have been there to see Enzo. There was no other reason to go to Nethic, especially if you were one of the higher ups in a totalitarian military force; the Purcels and Derducians didn’t produce any armaments, no fuel sources, or any other export that could possibly be useful to the First Order. So, Hux arranges a meeting with Enzo and since Leia’s ship has already left, he gives the okay. But now that Poe thinks about it, Enzo had contacted them at least twice before they’d gone off planet. How stupid could this Prylar Enzo guy be to schedule that shit back to back like that? The whole point in meeting out on that waste of a planet was to not have any witnesses, to keep things safe and low-key. Poe’s not a criminal genius, but he could pull off something like that better in his sleep. 

Enzo hadn’t counted on Rey showing up so late, spotting Hux, and then calling the resistance back to Nethic. 

Of course, this is going off of what? Hux’s word? Whatever Enzo told Leia to save his own skin after it looked like he’d sold them out? No, Poe doesn’t think that they’d been sold out. Otherwise Hux wouldn’t have come with a three man crew on that ship. He’d have brought a destroyer. Poe feels like he’s missing something and he hates that.

“Quiet please,” Leia says, and they listen. “He has agreed to full cooperation, not in trade for his life, which we are not necessarily in a position to offer, but willingly and without reciprocity. We ask for your patience, since many will be uncomfortable with his extended presence on board, and your trust that we will act in accordance with the best interests of the Resistance’s future and in respect of the tragedies of the recent past.”

Yeah, Poe doesn’t trust this. Weaselly men like Hux don’t do things out of the kindness of their hearts. They do what they have to do to gain power and oftentimes that means destroying others to do it. He needs to talk to Leia. He needs an inside track to this that the others aren’t getting. 

Finn is pissed. His lips grow small when he's pissed, puckering up like the nozzle of a balloon. He’s not even glaring at Leia, just into some middle distance beyond her. Poe can guess what he’s thinking. He’s thinking he shouldn’t have saved Hux from that wreckage, no matter what Rey said. Poe knows the feeling. Why did Rey have to insist they save that prick of a man?

He looks over to glare at her only to find that she’s gone. He can’t see her in the crowd around him. Well, he’ll blame her from a distance then. He’s not really the grudge holding type but he can practice. He crosses his arms over his chest and finally catches Finn’s eyes. Yep, they’re both pretty pissed.

* * *

  
  


As before, the guard outside of one of the many rooms in the medical area of the ship serves as a signpost of where General Hux is being kept, but this time she doesn’t know the man, a bearded humanoid leaning all of his sizable weight against the wall next to the door. His attention to her arrival is probably more out of boredom than duty, she would guess, as his eyes light up a bit when he sees her. 

“Hello,” he says in a friendlier manner than one expects from someone holding a blaster.

She smiles. “Hello. Is the prisoner currently allowed visitors?” she asks. 

He looks surprised. “You want to visit with the prisoner?” 

Right. With Beaumont as the guard, she hadn’t had to give any reason. She’d just asked if Hux was in there and hobbled on in. But this is a stranger who has been assigned to keep Hux in and others out. She lets her smile grow larger, more artificial (smiling is an effort these days). “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Rey.” She offers her hand.

He takes it happily. His gloves shift loosely as they shake. “I haven’t met you yet, but my name is Betton. I had a half-sister on Hosnian Prime and I’m glad I have the chance to thank you personally for helping destroy Starkiller.”

Oh, this should be easier than she expected. “I did my best though there were many others who did more, I think. Say, I was hoping to speak with the gen… the patient…prisoner...” She isn’t sure if Betton knows whom he is guarding. She seems to recall him referring to Hux as just “prisoner” but even though it’s only been a minute, she’s already forgotten if that’s the case. 

“And you think just because you’re a well-known battle hero that I’ll let you go in and see him?” Maybe it wouldn’t be so easy then. She’s not particularly fond of the tone of his voice, with how accusatory it sounds, but then an easy smile spreads across his face. “I’m just kidding you. Go on in. But,” he lowers his voice, “Please don’t kill him. I take guard duty very seriously. Plus, General Leia scares me, and I don’t want to be on her bad side.”

She promises not to.

General Hux is awake, sitting upright on his medical bed, looking at her with amused and attentive eyes. He looks healthier than he did the other day, and much better, obviously, than he had the first time they’d met. They’d put him in a grey gown with a small seam of white around its edges. It looks like a rough material, something that can handle the sterilizing process and warmer than the flimsier gown he had been in. His cheeks are no longer glistening with sweat, but they still look pale. It contrasts with his hair which is an orangey red, warmer in spirit than she considers him. She wonders if he is always so observant and so...mocking? He just radiates a condescension without having to speak a word. She remembers the way he’d called her scavenger, even after she’d told him her name, like he was better than her even while dying. She’s itching to fight. 

“Why didn’t you tell me that you’re paralyzed?” She hears the tremble in her voice, the one that happens when she’s really angry and even though she’s not yelling, she can feel a yell building in the back of her throat. His face is impassive. He’s just watching her, like he does, like she’s a specimen, a riddle to figure out. Why, the face seems to ask, is this lowly woman, this gnat, talking to me? She can feel her eyes starting to water, a response that happens sometimes when she’s angry and though she almost never actually cries, he won’t understand the involuntary nature of those unshed tears. He’ll think her weak like everyone does at first. “All that time you let me ramble on about my memory and my headaches and you couldn’t stand?”

She waits with clenched fists for him to respond. When he does, it’s deflective. “As a chronic migraine sufferer myself, I would never downplay the negative effects of a headache.” 

“You should have told me!”

“Why is that?”

She has no good answer to that. He’d made her feel foolish and petty by not telling her, certainly, but when was there ever an expectation to the contrary? They weren’t friends. They were just strangers thrust into a crisis together. She doesn’t understand her own feelings of betrayal. 

She looks around at the room. It’s identical to her own recovery room, minus the restraint bar. She hates it, which is silly because it’s not the room’s fault. He must be miserable here, she thinks. She’d been able to walk away from her bed. He won’t ever do that. She questions, momentarily, how much good saving him had done.

“Are you in pain?” she asks.

“No.”

“What about...the rest? You look healthier?” She touches her hand to the track that his restraints connect to. It feels cold under hand; everything about these rooms seems cold and impersonal, a temporary spot for illness and recovery. People die in these cold impersonal rooms. She’d rather face death with resistance, blazing anger and her lightsaber. She almost had more than a few times now.

“Your doctor did good work, though my spinal cord is unfixable.” It’s surprising that they’d come across that limitation with what they were able to do with her own injuries. Surely a spine should be easier to fix than a brain, but then, he probably didn’t have nanodroids. “You’re looking less battered today yourself,” he notes. 

This time when she sits down on his bed, she doesn’t ask, but she’s hyper aware of his immobile legs now; she takes special care not to brush up against them. She reaches her hand up and slowly pulls off the chunky brown cap revealing her bare head. They’d shaved it erratically, in a hurry to get beneath, so there are patches of hair, but overall, it’s smooth and bald. The healing incision marks thread over patches of purple bruising, like a road might weave around lakes as seen from above. 

The room is so quiet that the hum of the ship is the loudest sound, that and the occasional soft beep of medical equipment. 

“Dr. Boccaree has a steadier hand,” he says, a slight but soft smile plays across his lips. 

He moves the blanket off of him and fiddles with his gown, his restraints clinking as he shifts around in the bed. It looks as though he intends to expose his lower torso. Rey immediately looks away, an awkward blush rising to her cheeks. She’s not seen an exposed man this close before and she doesn’t intend to now. His movements still and he says, “It’s alright. Look.” Curiously, she flits her eyes quickly over. Oh, she understands now. He isn’t showing her his genitals (those are still adequately covered), but his injuries. Across his hip are tiny zigs and zags, already healed, from the look of it, or close to it. It looks like a star map. Over these are two long incision marks, straight and even in length. 

She hasn’t studied her head. She’d taken one look at the mirror and burst into tears. Finn had been there, had held her as only he was allowed to do. The cap had been waiting for her when she came out of the fresher. She’d immediately covered the horrible sight with the dear handmade hat. So, she doesn’t know if his doctor had done a better job, but she’s grateful that there are skilled healers willing to do this work. She’s also grateful that he’s sharing this with her, this visual representation of the horror they shared.

When he covers his pelvis again with the gown, her stare is broken and the moment of commiseration concludes. After the blanket is replaced, she asks, “So, is it true what Leia said, that you were down on that planet to aid the resistance? That you’re a spy?”

“I prefer operative. It sounds less dramatic.”

“That’s not an answer.” 

He sighs, as though truly put upon. “I’ve been over this already with Zanbre and Holdo. Don’t tell me they sent you for more details?” He raises up his hand and swirls it a bit in a circular motion. “Use your magical force powers to see if I’m telling the truth?” He’s mocking the Force as though it’s a far-fetched make-believe idea. Surely, his association with Kylo Ren has provided all the evidence he needs to trust what the Force can do.

Until her powers come back to her, Rey would rather not think about them at all. Their absence is too acute and she’s too frightened that it’s more than temporary. Also, the implication of being used as an intelligence extraction device offends her. “No one sent me here.”

Hux smirks. “Of course, or else you wouldn’t have had to charm the guard to see me.”

Her jaw tightens. She hadn’t been aware that he’d heard her conversation with the guard, whose name she no longer remembers. “No charming was involved.” This man wouldn’t know how to be charming if he had received lessons from a snake handler. “Anyway, you’re dodging my question.”

“That was not my intention. Yes, I was. I was picking up a trinket from Prylar Enzo who had received it from your people.”

What he received from Enzo was far more than a trinket. Resistance members had spent months designing the device and she had offered up her own time and endured the anxiety-inducing effects of those tests to produce it. She had collaborated with those very dedicated scientists and so she had a personal stake in its use. That device was something Leia herself had placed hopefully into unseen hands to be used against Kylo Ren. Now it turned out to be the bloody hands of this man.

He tilts his head to the side and studies her. “What about that bothers you? Were you hoping for a more heroic spy for the smuggling of your gadget?”

“Gadget” offends her nearly as much as “trinket” and anger rises up in her again. Finn had relayed Dr. Winchina’s warning about mood swings following head injuries, but it seems to be worse following conversations that have anything to do with General Hux. Yes, she would rather have had it be someone heroic, someone like Finn, someone with a pure heart trapped within the machine of the First Order. “Why help now? You killed trillions of people! Why try and be a hero now?”

Hux actually looks taken aback by the word, as though she just accused him of being a droid. “Whoever said I wanted to be a hero? I was aiding the Resistance, not atoning for…” he stops quickly. In a quieter tone, he says, “My motivations were never as fantastical as heroism.” 

A long moment passes between them. His motivations for helping the Resistance don’t matter in the long run and maybe that’s why he seems reluctant to actually tell her what they are. He’s right about not being a hero. He’s a villain and no doubt his reasons for helping them had been something self-serving. What she really wants to know is more personal. She asks it quietly, trying to shake off the remnants of that surge of anger. “So, why did you help me?”

“As you’ll recall, I was lying underneath bits of my ship and hardly in a position to help you.” She doesn’t need her connection to the Force to feel the dishonesty in this answer so rather than accept it, she just maintains eye contact. Strangely, this works. The handcuffs jangle as he turns his palms up and shrugs. “How should I know? Other than dying, I had nothing better to be doing.”

“So you had nothing better to do than to help me stay alive after your ship crashed and you had nothing better to do than to risk your life helping the resistance?” She’s raising her voice, enunciating the words in anger. She doesn’t buy any of this, still can’t believe that he’s the spy, and is frustrated that she understands so little about the man sitting in front of her and his mysterious motivations.

His head is pressed back tightly against the wall behind him which pushes his nose high into the air. He studies her, but rather than answering her, he poses a question of his own. “What do you want from me?”

She would think that would be obvious, what with her shouting questions at him. “Answers, obviously.”

“My answers are ‘Yes, I had nothing better to do other than to help you stay alive’ and ‘No, I didn’t commit treason out of boredom.’ Are those sufficient for you?”

“No! They aren’t!” she shouts. A streak of pain goes through her head. She grabs at it and her anger redirects inward. 

“Are you alright?” he asks. He looks alert, concerned. He doesn’t look mad at her, which she doesn’t understand. There’s a lot she doesn’t understand, apparently. “Does your doctor know that your headaches are this bad?”

She lowers her hands back down, the jagged streak having passed and left only a slight frizzle of pain where it had been. “Yes, but it’s to be expected.” 

“Right,” he says noncommittally, watching her. “Just don’t let them underestimate your symptoms because you aren’t complaining about them.”

She smiles slightly. “Who says I haven’t been complaining?” The truth is she’s only been complaining to her friends, not the strangers in medical with their busy schedules. “Are you going to be alright?”

Rey remembers Hux’s eyes being simultaneously cold and fiery during his Starkiller speech. Now they look sad, hopeless, as they had on the ship. It’s that damned resignation. “No, I don’t expect so.” 

She doesn’t know what to say. She has a lot to process. “May I come visit you again?”

His look of surprise is exaggerated to the point of comedy, though she knows he doesn’t intend it, but as with everything else, he recovers quickly. “I have no other pressing engagements,” he says coolly, as though he hadn’t just been taken off guard by the request.

She nods. “Tomorrow or the next day then.”

She makes small talk with the guard again on her way out. Betton had to have heard everything that was said, but he makes no mention of it and seems in as high of spirits as he had when she’d gone in. For her part, the visit hadn’t given her any of the answers she’d sought out, but she doesn’t really regret doing it either. 


	3. Chapter 3

Time passes so much faster as years accumulate. Almost losing Rey and accidentally capturing their own spy happened five days ago, yet Leia feels as though she’s just been told, in a way. For that matter, she still hasn’t processed Han’s murder and that’s been eight long months now. She’s still trying to wrap her head around all these major events in her life. Amilyn, whom she’s known since Ben was still growing inside of her, is impatient for a decision regarding their prisoner. She’d never come out and say that, too professional even with the years of friendship and respect between them, but her steady stream of suggestions is indicator enough. Leia’s uncertain how it is that Amilyn doesn’t feel like the galaxy is racing by them, leaving them far behind. With Luke in exile and her husband dead, Leia feels like a monolith, slow and immobile and crumbling.

Doctor Boccaree, the surgeon who has been attending to General Hux arrives and Leia sets aside her brooding. “Thank you for coming,” she says politely with a nod. 

“Of course.” 

She invites the doctor to have a seat anywhere in her quarters, a rather opulent collection of rooms located above the primary command bridge. As such, the doctor has at least four couches from which to choose. Once she’s settled on one, Leia takes a seat nearby. Her back is stiff. She keeps finding herself in a twisted position each morning, like her body has been trying to find Han next to her all night though they haven’t shared a bed in years. Soon, she tells herself, she’ll make time to talk to somebody about her grief, but as she’s been saying that for over a half a year, it’s not likely that soon will ever come.

“How is your son?” Leia asks. 

The doctor looks surprised to have her family’s health remembered. “Thank you for asking. He’s doing much better. I’m still not sure how he managed to catch such a rare disease while on a starship, but access to the resources to ease his symptoms was pivotal in his recovery.”

“I’m very glad to hear that. When something is wrong with your child, nothing else seems important.” It is not common knowledge that Kylo Ren is her son; she’s glad of this.

Doctor Boccaree nods. “I’m also grateful for the opportunity to keep him close to me through this.”

Resistance members are discouraged from having their children on fleet ships, but exceptions can be made for exceptional assets. Leia waves it off with her hand. It’s time to put the pleasantries aside anyway. “Shall we discuss your patient?”

“Of course.” 

“We haven’t spoken since the initial surgery, but you said that went well?”

“Well…” the good spirit leaves the doctor immediately. “I said that it would take nanotechnology to fix his spine, which was not something I got approval for. Now that we are past that point, he could instead be fitted with robotic technology, but it would be a substitute for what the nanodroids could have repaired.”

Even if she had known that General Hux was the spy, she wouldn’t have permitted the use of such precious equipment for that man. It had taken the doctor’s warning that Rey would be permanently damaged if they didn’t use nanotech to get Leia to approve the use of it for Rey, and she is probably the resistance’s greatest asset.

Leia doesn’t like that Boccaree is bringing this up again. She’d put her foot down then and, as the doctor herself has said, there’s nothing to be changed now. “Paraplegia aside, what other effects does he have?”

Boccaree frowns, displeased with Leia’s reverting the conversation to the topic at hand. “He says he’s no longer in pain, but some manual manipulation showed that isn’t true, so there’s no way of knowing how much pain he is experiencing. Nearly all the damage was to his hips and lower spine, with the exception of his left leg, the femur of which was broken. He barely even had any scrapes on the rest of his body; the bacta tank was only used to quick-heal the surgical wounds, for the most part. I’d have prefered to install the robotic tech while I still had him open but…”

Leia interrupts, “I think we can assume for now that more surgery is off the table.”

Boccaree freezes, then takes a deep inhale, her face drawing in tight like a dried fruit as she fights back anger and the need to backtalk her general. “Without surgery, he will be confined to some sort of motorized device for getting around. I’ve seen these used on more backwater planets, though cost-wise, it’s not dissimilar to limb replacement, or in this case, robotic spinal fittings.”

“Doctor, I was asking you for how he was doing now, not how he could be doing with more care.” Leia isn’t heartless, she sees that Boccaree is looking out for the best interest of her patient and she appreciates that the man has someone rallying for him, but she simply isn’t going to approve care for a dead man. Until they decide his fate in the long-term, she’d rather not worry about his short-term prospects. 

“He’s despondent. His sleeping brainwave patterns show nearly constant nightmares. He will have to work through the trauma he’s experienced…”

Leia interrupts again, “I think we both understand that healing his PTSD right now is also off the table.”

“General, if you’re intending to execute him, why bother asking about his health at all?” asks Boccaree, finally reaching her limit with the indifferent way that Leia is talking about her patient.

“We want him to recount the facts to a small tribunal within two weeks. I need to know that he’s healthy enough to participate in that discussion.” The tribunal is her own idea, one not yet run by the other members of the High Council, but she wants to make sure it’s even an option. If he’s as despondent as the doctor says, then he might not even be able to represent himself before them. Leia doesn’t want it to be a trial, since his wrongs are already well-documented, and she doesn’t want to earn the man any more publicity than he’s already had. She wants something private, relatively unbiased, and flexible. He’d reached out to the Resistance through Enzo, wanting to bring down the First Order, and she doesn’t want that to be discounted. At the same time, no one had ever killed more innocent people in one action, not even Admiral Tarkin. Leia thinks she’s done a damn good job separating the two incidents in her mind; she hopes she is for the sake of justice. 

“Physically, he’ll be able to  _ sit  _ for his tribunal.” She emphasizes the word sit stubbornly. “Mentally, he’s intact, but psychologically, he’s damaged by the incident.”

“We all are in this war, Doctor,” sighs Leia. 

“Not irreparably,” says Boccaree. “He doesn’t have to be alone in his recovery. None of us do.”

It’s a powerful sentiment, one that Leia actually agrees with. If General Hux lives, maybe she’ll see what she can do to help him get therapy. Until then, she’s not going to extend their resources unnecessarily. “Thank you for your professional opinion, Doctor Boccaree, and for making time to talk to me today.”

After she sees the doctor to the door and they exchange farewell pleasantries, Leia sits back down where she had been sitting one one of the pearl-colored couches. It feels like her efforts are never enough, no matter what. Her dedication as a mother, a diplomat, a fighter has all been in vain. There are always wars and there will always be the dark side calling to even the most well-raised sons. Some days, Leia feels like giving up. 

* * *

  
  


“No, absolutely not,” says Poe, vehemently putting his foot down. “It’s too soon.”

Finn isn’t exactly a neutral party, but he hasn’t been brought into this argument yet, so he watches with crossed arms from the sidelines, watching the two combatants. He would be hard-pressed to choose which of the two is more bullheaded. They’re cut from the same cloth in that way, capable and determined, yes, but also stubborn as undomesticated bantha. He often tries to lightly veer to safer topics, lest he get trampled between them, but there’s no avoiding this fight. Rey still had bandages on her head when she was complaining about being a burden to everyone, so of course, three days out of medbay, she’s already looking to prove her usefulness, to earn her keep around the Raddus. Finn would feel the same way if their positions were reversed, but they were both the new kids, the orphans that were used to working for their supper.  
“Excuse me, but that should be up to me to decide.”

“No, that’s up to a wing commander to decide! Someone with a hell of a lot more flight time than you.”

“And up to the doctor,” adds Finn, feeling the need to duck from the glare she gives him. This is why they do occasionally team up against her: those eyes are dangerous when it’s just one person taking the hit.

The main hangar bay is bustling with mechanics and flight crew prepping ships, making minor repairs, cleaning up tools, and all the busy work that occurs before missions. It’s after mid-day meal and Finn’s got a full belly because he’s not going to be joining the pilots who are going out. Poe had joined him in the mess hall, picking some choice items off Finn’s plate but not getting one of his own. Finn doubts that even the twistiest of flight paths could upset the wing commander’s stomach, so not eating is probably more of a ritual. Resistance pilots have as many superstitions as stormtroopers, lucky forms of everything from jewelry to pressed flowers and as varied an assortment of bad juju-repelling gestures and behavior as there are individuals.

“Look, I know I’m ready. I haven’t had so much as a headache today.”

“Oh, one day! Well, that certainly makes me feel better about it.” Poe’s got his arms crossed but his upper body is tilted back a bit, as though she might lunge for his face like an agitated snake.

“It doesn’t matter how you feel about it!”

“Ah, but you see,” he says, raising up his pointer finger and wagging it at her. “It does. See, cause you’re not getting into any of these ships without  _ my  _ say-so.”

Finn winces at the mistake. He can see by the sparkle in Rey’s eyes that she’s already accepted his challenge. “Have you learned nothing at all about Rey?” he asks Poe incredulously. “You see, you just dared her to do something, right? Obviously now she’s going to find a way to do it.”

Poe frowns at him before looking back to Rey. “Don’t take that as a dare!”

After a moment of unspoken and unpsychically telegraphed arguing, Finn speaks up. “Look, Rey, you still don’t feel like yourself. You’ve said that. And your powers are still fritzed. Maybe just try and get on the next mission?” Cajoling sometimes works. Finn hopes his tactic will work where Poe’s, complete hostile refusal, absolutely would fail. “You don’t want to be a liability. Just lay low like one more week, maybe you won’t have had any headaches all week then and maybe the force will back.”

Still, she glares at him. “And what if they don’t come back?” she demands. 

They haven’t said it outloud, not in the six days since the crash. It’s always been a matter of  _ when _ Rey gets her Force powers back, not  _ if _ . Giving voice to it here in the hangar knocks the wind from Poe’s sails. Rey will be devastated if it doesn’t come back; she’s become so adept with it, so used to its constant companionship since she’s been training with Leia. 

“It will,” says Finn gently. He believes it, too, but that doesn’t change that it hasn’t yet and that there’s no guarantee. 

“We don’t know that.” Her voice is firm, angry. For her, it’s a worst case scenario. “I can’t just put this war on hold until I’m better because I might not be better.”

The two men stand in silence, afraid to say the wrong thing. This is a very real fear she has and while they might not think she’s ready to fly, they don’t want to dismiss what she’s saying because to do so would downplay what she’s going through. 

When she speaks again, it’s her turn to take a cajoling tact. “It’s just an escort for non-armament supplies. There’s not going to be a less important mission for me to take. I’ll be with you, Poe, so I’ll be fine.” 

Poe and Finn communicate through looks. Finn knows that Poe is caving and Poe is asking for Finn to help him not cave but Finn kinda is too. It’s all very quick, these non-Force telepathic conversations that they have. 

“Please,” she says. “Let me test myself with something simple.”

“You’re going to have me there too,” says Finn.

Poe squints at Rey. “Fine, but you can’t use this emotional plea ploy, okay? We care too much about you, so it counts as cheating.”

* * *

Hux is reading The Tree with No Leaves, an overly sentimental fictional work about planetside life, when he hears Rey’s voice in the hall outside of the room. Given how little he has to do these days, his excitement is understandable, and given how things had gone last time, so is his surprise. She’d nearly stormed out when she’d discovered that he had been in possession of their force neutralizing device. He assumes she’d been the test subject for the device since force powers such as hers are nearly unheard of following the Jedi purge, but surely she knew that it was being passed to someone with access to Kylo Ren. Perhaps she’d have preferred it installed by someone meeker like Mitaka, someone with less direct control of the destruction the First Order had wrought over the Hosnian Sector. Well, these Resistance beggars can’t be choosers. 

He understands, of course, that Rey is not the Resistance; she is merely a new recruit and may have, seems to have, her own opinion regarding whom they should trust. Apparently, he hasn’t made the cut.

After wrapping up her conversation in the hall (she’s making friends with another of his guards, spreading goodwill to all like a children’s story character), she enters the room. He keeps his eyes trained on the datapad, foolishly making it seem as though he’s much more engaged in the flowery drivel on the screen than he is. 

“I came back,” she announces. 

He sets down the pad and looks up at her. She’s wearing a white garment similar to the one she’d been wearing on the Antioch (as it is bloodstain-free, he assumes it to be a different one). The hat is still there, a protective layer hiding the mess of dismantled and re-pieced skin; he hadn’t mentioned it, but the post-surgical mess is not as unattractive to the eye as the silly hat. “Aha, come to yell more questions at me?” he asks.

She rolls her eyes and immediately takes up residence at the end of his bed. Her movements are faster, easier. She looks more focused, less pained. She’s feeling better. It’s bitter, the jealousy he feels over her recovery. It’s only been a week; he’ll be this way the rest of his life.

“Your headache is gone.”

She nods. “It is. Please don’t bring it back.” He doesn’t bother offering a response. He doesn’t hold himself responsible for her last one. All he had done was answer her questions; it’s on her if she didn’t care for those answers. “They gave you a datapad?” she asks, obviously just making conversation.

“With limited capabilities, of course.” He raises it up for show. “I’ve been discovering an entire galaxy of ostentatious prose.” After no response comes from her, during which time he considers the possibility that she might not understand the word ostentatious, he adds, lightly in tone but seeking confirmation of a suspicion, “Perhaps you can make me a recommendation on what to read next?”

She looks down, but quickly corrects for her brief demonstration of embarrassment by raising her chin a touch higher and smiling spuriously. “I don’t read… much.”

“A drawback of growing up alone on Jakku?” He takes no pleasure in discovering her illiteracy and with how quick her mind is, she could fix that soon enough. 

“I  _ can _ read,” she corrects. She draws up one of her lithe legs, wraps her arms around her knee. He’s seen her do that before. It’s one of her many childlike mannerisms. “Mostly I read mechanical manuals.” 

“Hence your speedy assembly of the beacon.”  
“Well, it would have been easier if I’d had a manual for that! No, I just… I like machines. They listen… cooperate.” 

Hux has found the opposite to be true. He’s rather convinced that every machine is out to either kill him or drive him mad. Though to be fair, he feels much the same about people as well. 

“And droid manuals, if you’ve got the droid in front of you, you can sort of see what the words and diagrams are talking about, especially if it’s in pieces. They help teach you what the individual parts can do and how they interact with each other to make the whole thing go. Then, when you see it, you know it. It’s like the Force in a way, all these little parts that work together to make something huge.”

He’s beginning to get a picture of what her life must have been like on Jakku. Without her parents, she’d looked to machines to listen to her. She’d been surrounded by broken parts, but when she fixed them, turned them into something functional, then they became a part of her life, something akin to family. It’s fascinating, much more so than the stories he’s been reading, to hear her speak so passionately about something so utterly mundane. She glows with it. Is this what bewitched Ren? 

Awkwardly, Rey realizes she’s been talking only about herself. “So, have you had any other visitors?”

He’d rather not think about his visit from Holdo this morning. The bulk of the visit was fine. She’d brought the datapad, a menial task for a woman of her rank, but she also had questions for him about the First Order and he had already promised them full cooperation with their questions. What he resents, and the reason why none of his reading as gone well (other than their selection being a nearly limitless library of meaningless swill), is her perplexing Dejarikesque move to keep him in the loop about the Resistance’s decision process surrounding his captivity. He almost resents that she’d informed him that a council is being assembled to decide his fate. They should just cart him into a room of judgmental dissidents, broadcast their show trial, and mete out his punishment. The First Order, which isn’t as propagandistic as its predecessor The Empire, could have done this efficiently and quietly with adequate interrogation methods within 24 hours. 

He recognizes that the Resistance needs to maintain its appearance as “the good guys,” a foil to the First Order that the masses can rally behind. Of course, it’s all bollocks; the Resistance is peace and love until something needs blown up, until someone needs taken out, and then they have as little reluctance to execute those actions as their much more forthright enemies. Hux knows this, and they needn’t try and convince him otherwise. He isn’t the common rabble looking for a government to fix his life, so why tell him in private about their plans? The courtesy confounds him.

Returning to Rey’s question, he errs on the side of avoiding mentioning Holdo. “None that have wanted to discuss technical manuals with me.”

“That’s not why I came,” Rey says mildly. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

“I have had one visitor, yes.” He’d rather keep talking about droid repair, a testimony to how his isolation is negatively affecting his mental health.

“Okay,” she sighs. She looks around the room struggling to come up with things to talk about. As like-minded as he’s beginning to suspect they are, they have no commonalities of interests that he's noticed and she seems to be avoiding the topic which so enraged her the other day. “Has your condition improved?”

“Not as noticeably as yours, unfortunately.”

“Oh, my condition hasn’t improved,” she says, gaze off in the middle distance. 

Hux has met a few people who he thinks of as “noisy thinkers” and this girl definitely qualifies. He can practically see the imagined list in the air, all the woes that she’s suffering. “The headaches?”

“That’s gotten better, but my memory… I can’t retain anything.”

“Seems like a natural consequence of a concussion.” He isn’t actually engaging in a battle with her over the worthiness of her complaints. He’s definitely worse off and they both know it. He’s just adding commentary for her list. 

“That’s what Doctor Winchina says. About everything.” 

“And you disagree?”

Rey sighs. “No. I just meant that the injuries might be all in here.” She points to her head. “But they are still there. They’re real.”

“With less bleeding from the nose and ears…” he says. When she shoots him a quick glare, he adds, “I would hope.”

She laughs a little, just a polite exhalation. “Yes, my ears haven’t been bleeding.”

She’s also not recovering from a severed spine, a shattered pelvis, five broken ribs, and a broken dislocated leg. He’s glad of it. One person with these injuries is certainly enough. “Then you’re intact, more or less, with a well-demarcated road to recovery.”

“No.” Her face darkens. “I’ve lost…” she stops, uncertain if she should continue. Hux gathers immediately what she’s talking about. She’s lost her Force powers. No wonder she’s so upset. “It’s not important,” she says too late.

“You couldn’t have extracted information from my mind, if you’d wanted to,” he says slowly. While he understands her reluctance to have him know, he’s no longer a threat. He’s no one now, not a general, as Zanbre had been ass enough to remind him, not a spy, as his cover’s been blown. But she still looks regretful and embarrassed. 

If this had happened to Ren, heads would have rolled. 

“Will the Resistance keep you if it persists?” he asks. This is the wrong question to ask, he sees by the flicker of anger that dashes across her eyes. He’s getting used to it, despite the brevity of their acquaintance, and knows that, luckily, it diffuses quickly as well.

“Of course they will! I’m very useful here to Leia, even without the Force.”

Oh, he’d struck a nerve indeed! She’s been worried they won’t want her now. Stupid, his idle question. He’d been more curious about her own plans should she find herself without her powers and wondered if Ren would still be as eager to snatch her up and recruit her without them. He hadn’t meant to echo her own fears. “I’ve seen your resourcefulness,” he offers, a lame consolation. He doesn’t have much practice in making others feel better. In fact, he’s not sure why he’s trying with her, except for he wants her to keep returning. 

“I’d hoped that it would come back when the headaches got better.”

That’s why she hates Doctor Winchinia. He hadn’t fixed the part that really mattered and, of course, medical doctors wouldn’t know the first thing about repairing spiritual connections. He’s probably treading on thinner ice asking, but if it’s something she hasn’t considered, he has to put it to her. “Is this something that Luke Skywalker could assist with?”

“What?” 

“The Jedi,” he says. “One would think that if anyone would know about Force…” he pauses to think what it would be called, “detachment…” that doesn’t sound like a good word choice at all, but he continues. “That it would be a Jedi.”

She rocks angrily. “No, I…. he’s not… he’s not helping us.”

He had only known that they had successfully found the map to Skywalker’s location. He hadn’t realized that there would be coercion needed to recruit his assistance. That must have really demoralized the Resistance, having found their beloved mystical figurehead only to have him refuse to help. It pleases him, though he focuses intently on not revealing this pleasure to Rey, who would storm out in a heartbeat if she knew.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she says. He appreciates the clear conversational boundary.

“Would you prefer to hear about life on Rishi?” he asks wrly, picking up his datapad and waving it from side to side.

She smiles. “Yes, I think I would.” She looks around and then, spying the roller chair, hooks it with her foot and wheels it close to the bed. She sets her feet upon it, wiggles her backside a bit to get more comfortable in the small spot afforded her, and looks at him expectantly.

Hux had not actually been offering to read to her, certainly not from this drivel. He flounders for a second, unsure how to proceed.

“Wait, where is Rishi?” she asks.

“Outer Rim, Albion...no Abrion system?” He hates when people give answers that they don’t actually know. “Outer Rim.” It occurs to him that he is completely unaware of where  _ he _ is. It’s disorienting. At least, with the inclusion of the datapad in his life, he knows what time it is. Now he just needs to know his location and he’ll have the required elements to exist in reality. 

“Then, yes I would.” 

“Where would Rishi need to be for you not to want to listen?” he asks, curious. 

Her slender shoulders shrug. Then, she looks at him and with a wide grin says, “Anywhere near Nethic.”

He studies the words on the datapad to keep from laughing. He goes ahead and reads what’s there, where he’d stopped at earlier. “Amid the yellow coils of the flim bush, I spied the source of the sound. Surely it couldn’t be, but it was… there before me was that rarest of birds, the Jumchee. Oh, how its opalescent wings shone, reflecting the sun like a prism, and I, in my wonderment catalogued every hue, the amethyst, the azure, the… Are you sure you want me to read from this dreadful book?” he asks.

She’s been watching him, he notices, as he looks up and their eyes meet. “I like it.”

“You would…” he says and she smiles.

“The silver, the seafoam, the rose…”

* * *

  
  


Leia sends for her only minutes after she’s left Hux’s room. It feels like a close call, though it really shouldn’t. Poe knows about her visits, and he hasn’t told Finn, but that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t clued General Leia in. Also, the guards probably report her visits, though she’s not sure to whom. So, it’s all in the open. Still, she feels guilty on her way to meet with Leia. Telling herself that it’s none of Finn’s business where she comes and goes is a lie, because he has such a personal stake in this particular person. And Hux had wronged Finn, had wronged every stormtrooper that he had ordered about as though they belonged to him. 

To her surprise, it’s Poe who greets her upon her arrival to Leia’s quarters. He has a stemmed glass in his hand and he gives her a half hug with his free hand. His smile is tight, not as free-flowing as his tend to be, and his stare is one of concern. Everyone’s giving her that look a lot, like she’s made of glass. The crash had proven the opposite to some extent; she and Hux were more resilient than they appeared. The looks say they’re still waiting for the broken pieces to hit the ground. “Welcome to the party,” he says softly. 

There are strangers in the room, a woman with a long neck and lovely violet hair and a man with mouth tentacles in a suit with many pearls. They form a triangle with Leia. It’s good that Poe is present as well or she’d feel like a kid with everyone being so much older and sophisticated than her. Poe may have a decade on her, but most of the time he’s as mature as a fifteen year old. She smiles nervously. “I’m here.” 

“Rey,” says Leia with an affection that Rey can only hear and not sense. She comes over, gliding easily past her companions and taking Rey’s hands in hers. “I’m so glad you’re here. Are you feeling alright today?”

Leia hasn’t been to visit her since she’d been discharged from medical watch, but no doubt word has gotten back to her about Rey’s continued mental incapacitation. More than that, Leia will be able to feel the difference in her; they won’t be able to communicate with their mind-words. It’s humiliating to be standing here like this, her new handicap visible to a woman she respects and loves more than any other. It’s one of the reasons that she hasn’t sought her master out.

Rey nods. It’s all she can manage. 

Luckily, Leia’s had enough years serving in a diplomatic capacity. She doesn’t press the issue, not with the strangers here. She shifts to the side, sort of displaying Rey. “Rey, this is Vice Admiral Holdo and member of The Resistance High Council Cogtho Zanbre.”

The tentacle faced man steps forward first, his hands lifting in some unknown gesture of greeting, “I am also a seat member of the Quarren Interspecies Coalition and Head Linguistics Professor at the Semiaquatic School of Greater Nosso. It is an honor to meet the new Jedi.” 

She mimics his hand-raising, hoping desperately that she’s doing it right. “An honor as well, but I’m not a Jedi.”

“Well, you can manipulate the Force; that’s enough!” When he laughs, his tentacles wiggle as though each one is also enjoying the joke. It’s not a funny joke and she’s not going to pretend for his sake that it is. She would never think of what she’s been able to tap into as “manipulation,” a word so loaded with evil intent that she’s offended he would think it acceptable to apply to her. He watches her, waiting for her to react. When she doesn’t, his bright mood seems to dim a bit, probably along with expectations of what a Jedi is like. He steps back. 

The woman, Rey’s already forgotten her name, merely tilts her head in acknowledgment of the introduction. “We’re very glad you could meet with us.” The translation being, ‘We’re glad you didn’t bleed to death on the ship your friends shot down.’ It sounds better the way she says it. 

Rey realizes that she’s once again had a mood shift. It’s almost always towards anger, like everyone around her is deliberately trying to provoke the ire in her. It’s that dreadful tentacled man, Corgo or whatever. She’s going to try very hard not to take it out on this woman. “I’m sorry, my memory hasn’t been very good lately. Your name was…?” 

“Holdo,” she says, cutting out the title to make it easier. It helps, honestly.

“Holdo,” Rey replies with a smile. 

“And I am Cogtho Zanbre!” repeats the nasty self-absorbed little man that she has gone from disliking to actively hating all within the span of five words. 

When it becomes clear that Rey is not going to humor him with a response, Leia speaks up. “We wanted to include you in this conversation. While decisions have already been made, we could always use your input, Rey. And you know General Hux better than anyone else here.”

Rey blanches. So the guards had reported her visits to the general! Or, it could be that Leia’s only referring to her time spent on his ship with him. She doesn’t know and can’t try and find out, honestly, wouldn’t be able to even if she still had her Force connection because Leia would feel it. A sane voice reminds her that she hasn’t done anything wrong. If that’s the case then, why does it feel like a betrayal? She flicks her eyes at Poe. “I… don’t know him well.”

Leia doesn’t give away anything with her facial expression or movement. “And that’s fine. I’m just offering the opportunity to speak up about anything you want to in regards to how we intend to proceed with General Hux.”

Why she’s being included in how they intend to proceed with General Hux is beyond Rey, but she nods. “Okay.” 

Every scrap of information that goes through Rey’s ears gets sifted through her brain, retaining only individual grains. The headaches and the light sensitivity were minor nuisances though those were the ones that corrected themselves first. She can’t sleep because her memory seems to work perfectly only when she’s unconscious, conjuring with perfect clarity the worst moments in her recent history - the crash, Han’s murder, being interrogated and hunted by Kylo Ren. When she’s awake she’s in a mental haze, subject to the whims of her fickle anger. She seems to fluctuate between a drugged idiot and an angry drunkard. Even now, when she should be paying attention (and she really is trying), she’s distracted by how insubstantial she feels. She’s in a room with four other people and she can’t feel anything from them, no emotions, no solidity to their presence, nothing. It’s like she’s a ghost, unable to interact with them in any meaningful way. They (Leia, Holdo, Corgo, and Poe) are talking about the committee that will be deciding Hux’s fate; she (the ghost of Rey) is listening, but it’s filtered, muted as though coming from a different room. 

As she understands it, there will be two more members of the Resistance High Command joining Leia, Holdo, and Corgo the blowhard in two days time. They will interview Hux and they will decide what is to be done with him. Corgo wants to include someone he knows who was born in the Hosnian system, but Leia and Holdo aren’t fond of the idea, and she’s having trouble following why. She can see that it makes Leia angry, but that she’s trying to keep her emotions hidden. It’s good to know that Rey has some intuition without her Force connection.

“Rey, when the tribunal meets, we would like for you to recount your experience of the crash. Is that something you feel capable of doing?” asks Leia.

It’s not her favorite topic to discuss, but she’s willing if it’s necessary for the process. “Of course,” she offers. 

“Good, so we will be factoring in her account of the events at the time.”

“And what of the Force Dampener? We aren’t going to find another person who has that kind of access to Kylo Ren,” Holdo says. Even with the lovely dress that matches her hair, she doesn’t seem unprofessional. The kindness shown when she’d repeated her name for Rey adds a dimension to the stern way that she’s been speaking. 

“If you’re suggesting that we give it back to him and send him back to the Finalizer…” Leia starts.

“Of course not! It’s been too long. It would be too suspicious.”  
“That’s a missed opportunity now,” says Corgo. Even with her distaste for him, it is interesting to watch his tentacles move as he talks. She wonders how much control of them he has, because they are constantly in motion, like a breathing chest or fluttering eyelids.

“Completely or just with Hux doing it?” asks Poe. 

“Exactly my thought,” says Holdo. “Just because we don’t currently have that kind of access to the command crew, doesn’t mean that can’t find another way to install it.”

Corgo answers. “We were also using Hux to track Kylo Ren’s movements. We no longer have advance notification of where he’ll be.”

Rey thinks about the apparently wasted hours that she’d devoted to the device’s creation. They’d stuck electrodes to her skin, remotely testing the device’s settings. She’d hated the feel of the dampener when they’d finally gotten working. As the scientists were whooping and hollering, she felt muted, like she does now all the time. It had been miserable. Only now she’s stuck this way, or has been for the last week, since Hux’s ship had crashed with the Dampener on it. 

An epiphany, no doubt delayed by the head injury, strikes her. It’s like lightning through her body. “Where is the Dampener now?”

Leia studies her, probably reaching out with the force to see if Rey’s powers are back or maybe just to get a sense of why she’s asking. 

It’s Holdo that answers the question. “It’s safe. I returned it to the research team.”

“Leia, I need to go.” She waits for approval, but even that delay seems too long. Leia nods, allowing the dismissal. 

Rey catches Poe’s curious look before she leaves but doesn’t stop to explain.

* * *

  
  


“No, I’m showing that it’s completely inactive,” says Hayfa.

Rey wants to scream at the little metal rod, wants to jettison it into space. She’d been so certain, even if only for a little bit that the Dampener had gotten switched on somehow during the crash. She’d already imagined one of the team pushing a button and for her connection to be restored to the universe around her. In this fantasy, it also fixed the other brain problems. 

Hayfa continues. “Besides, even if it had somehow turned on by itself, there’s no way that the range would reach out to the other parts of the Raddus. We determined it has only a range of 2 meters, remember?”

“I barely remember my name these days,” growls Rey. She does remember, because things before the crash are still fine, but she wants to complain about her symptoms. She’s still reeling from being wrong. 

Hayfa picks the Dampener up and holds it out to Rey as though demonstrating. “When you left the room, you were able to hear us in your head again, so we had you come back in again and we measured when the Force loss occurred.”

Rey actually stomps her foot, the sound of boot on metal making a clink sound. “I know that! I do remember that! I’m not a child. I needed to know that this wasn’t on and… stopping my connection.”

Hayfa’s baby blue face, with its narrow cheeks and pointed chin looks as focused as her personality is. The minor tantrum doesn’t upset her, but she does tilt her head to the side and ask with as much incredulity as is warranted, but feels, in the moment, incredibly harsh. “You were hoping it got accidentally triggered  _ and  _ increased its radius by fifteen hundredfold?”

Under normal circumstances, Rey handles being wrong well, but this woman (who formerly she had liked) is judging her and she feels like lashing out again, an all too familiar feeling. “I was just looking for answers! I haven’t been able to tap into the Force since the crash and this thing…” She points with a stabby accusing finger at the tiny device in Hayfa’s hand, “retards force powers! And I just want that connection back. I can’t… I can’t keep being half a person!” She can hear the tears in her voice before she feels them fall. She wipes at them with a closed fist and wishes she was anywhere other than this lab. Part of her wishes was that she'd just stayed on Jakku. It’s worse to have something and have it taken away. Many times she’s thought that about her parents, that it would be better if she couldn’t remember them at all. “I’m sorry.”

Though she’s reached the point with Finn where they consistently use physical contact and the hugs that she gets from Leia (too infrequent but all the more powerful because of their rarity) are absolutely welcome, but with most people she prefers some distance. Growing up, she hadn’t had that, a touch was more likely to harm than to soothe. Rey is still uncomfortable with touches from those she doesn’t know well. Hayfa most likely feels similarly, if the awkwardly patting hand on her shoulder is any indicator. “I’m sorry, Rey. I hadn’t heard. That sounds very hard for you.”

It’s not that there’s a lack of compassion in the voice, but they seem spoken with difficulty, as though Hayfa’s having to ad-lib this consolation. It’s a sweet gesture anyway and Rey hates that yet again people are having to go out of their way to extend sympathy to her. Maybe it’s time she just stopped yelling all of her fears and angers at the people around her so they don’t have to keep pitying her. “I’m sorry, Hayfa. I get so frustrated.” She wipes a sleeve across her eyes.

The lab looks a bit blurry but otherwise exactly the same as it had the last month. Nothing ever changes here. It’s always sterile and filled with metal and glass. It’s nice in its own way, but it feels cold and she still associates it with her own testing. She could never be like Hayfa, Rolli, Og’Ris, or any of the other people who worked here creating and fixing technology for the cause. Rey needs to be out and free. She’s grown more accustomed to being on a starship, but she gets a little nutty if she doesn’t go off-ship, particularly onto a planet, once in a while. She’s glad that Poe hadn’t clipped her wings entirely for that reason. She’d be even more of a mess than she is now. 

“You say that you haven’t been able to feel  _ any _ Force since your accident?” Hayfa’s in a problem-solving mode, which is much more fitting for her than empathetic. 

Rolli enters then and Rey blushes at yet another person seeing her with red wet eyes. She straightens her back and raises her chin, willing herself to look unemotional. “Rey!” says Rolli happily. He’s much as his name suggestions, round around the midsection. His deep indigo skin tone contrasts with his white coat. He taps his forehead to Hayfa’s, a traditional greeting between Altiri couples. Rey averts her eyes at the display of affection, as she often does; it feels like spying on something too intimate. “What brings you to the lab?” he asks Rey.

Instead, Hayfa answers. “Rey’s temporarily lost her Force connection and she’s come to see if we can fix it.”

The quick re-framing of her visit’s purpose appeals to Rey, even while she’s not quite sure she’s ready to switch over as quickly as Hayfa had from defeatism to scientific curiosity.

Rolli frowns. “From being on the downed ship?” Then, when Rey nods, he offers, “I was sorry to hear you went through that. Hayfa and I were happy to hear you made it through.”

Hayfa groans. “Enough with the pleasantries, Rolli! We have a task at hand.” To Rey, “So, there’s nothing or is it just faint?”

Well, the doctor had washed his hands of this aspect of Rey’s mind. Perhaps a scientist could succeed where a doctor had failed. “Nothing. It feels like… when all you can hear in one ear is a ringing.”

“Like you’ve been cut off from the source or like the hose has a knot?”

Both scientists are looking at her as though she’s under a microscope. That, at much, she’s used to from them, and she’s sure is how they treat everyone. “I’m not sure either. It’s like a song being sung in another room and I can’t hear it.” It’s overly romantic of a description, but appropriate. At least she didn’t mention feeling like a ghost.

Rolli and Hayfa look at each other, each considering the possible problems and solutions. He notices the Dampener in his mate’s hand, still there from her demonstration before Rey’s emotional outburst. A wide smile spreads across his face. “What happens if we turn up the music?”

Hayfa slowly smiles too. She looks at Rey. “Are you ready to be our test subject some more?”

The hope and the excitement stirs again. “Absolutely!”


	4. Chapter 4

“Why are you holding it weird?” asks Poe. 

“Shut up. I’m not holding it weird.” If Finn is holding the eating utensil wrong, it’s only because he’s not totally sure what it is. “I’m holding it just like you are, so maybe you should stop holding it weird.” 

“I’m holding it like this.” Poe demonstrates. “My thumb is under this part.”

Though embarrassed, he does slightly change his grip, trying to emulate Poe’s. He watches Poe scoop up one of the little jelly blobs with the spiral part, raise up the utensil, give a little flick of the wrist, and then pop the blob into his mouth. Looks simple enough. He tries to wrangle one of the blobs away from the rest of its herd, but it bobs and weaves as though it’s alive and looking for escape. Finally he gets it into the cup part without having to use his other hand like he was worried he’d have to. He raises it up, trying to keep it at a steady angle so it doesn’t slip out. He flicks his wrist, but he must not do it right because it doesn’t leave the utensil. He tries again. Finally, he just sort of slurps it off.

“Ack!” he cries out with a disgusted cough. The blobs are crunchy! That was not the texture he’d expected. “Oh man, what are these things?”

“Chogurian Fungus dumplings.”

Finn doesn’t care what they’re called and he doesn’t much care for the amusement in his friend’s eyes. He’s the farthest thing from a picky eater but since when were mushrooms crunchy? He sets down the stupid do-dad. “Yeah, well, some people prefer their food less slimy.”

Mess Hall 1 on the Raddus is huge and, despite the amount of people on board, not usually very busy. It’s really early morning, so it’s not surprising that the place is practically empty. He, Poe, and Rey always sit at this table even though it’s just a random spot. If the mess hall was a human body, their table would be right under the right shoulder blade in that impossible-to-scratch part. Having a designated eating spot comes naturally to Finn. In the First Order, stormtroopers always eat in the same spot and with their own batch. Then, one batch would take big losses and its survivors would have to be absorbed into another batch. The new batches, he’d heard, treated the incomers like shit, as if they hadn’t been through enough losing the people that they were close to (which in the Stormtrooper program wasn’t very). While Finn thinks about his time in Batch Eight a lot, he doesn’t spare much of it on the actual people. They’d done their duty on Jakku; he couldn’t miss his association with people that could follow through with that, even if he’d only missed out on being one of them by a narrow margin.

Poe’s looking over Finn’s head at something that makes him smile, so Finn turns his head. Rey’s approaching them and he can tell in an instant that something’s different. She’s back to warmth and smiles. As she gets nearer to them, it’s like he can feel her happiness inside of him, like it’s his own. He stands up and she launches herself into his arms. He hugs tightly starting to spin her before catching himself mid-momentum. That would do her vertigo no favors.

“It’s back?” he asks her, though he already knows the answer.

The room feels more alive than it had a moment ago. Finn’s more aware of the people around them, some of which are looking at them hugging. Poe’s wondering how long the hug is going to last cause he wants in on it too. Knowing this, somehow, he lifts an arm, lets him get in on the now threeway hug.

Simultaneously two thoughts pop into his head.  _ I have to tell him it’s not really back _ he recognizes as Rey’s. The  _ I could do this every damn day _ could be his, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. When the hug concludes, he asks her, “What do you mean it’s not really back?”

She looks surprised, then sheepish. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to think that so loudly.” He never has a problem with her talking inside his head. It’s become more frequent with the bond they’ve formed over the months together and with Leia’s training. He does get a little freaked out when it seems like she’s picked something up from him by accident, because there’s a world of things in a guy’s head that she does not need or want to be introduced to. 

_ This is still a top secret device,  _ Rey thinks, looking at the space around them. “I’m not sure here is a good place to talk.” Sure, it’s a room with probably fifty people, maybe more, but it’s also the size of a small village. He’s not sure what top secret thing she’s referring to but it feels overcautious to worry about being heard. “I should probably tell you in private.”  _ I should tell Leia next. _

_ Is she including me in this too, or just Finn? _

There was no denying it this time; that had been Poe’s voice in his head. Finn gapes at the pilot next to him with shock. 

“What?”

_ Why is he looking at me funny? _

He can hear Poe’s words, but his mouth isn’t moving, and they have that particular resonant quality that Rey’s mental words do. 

“What? Do I have dumpling on my face?” Poe wipes self-consciously around his mouth with a sleeve. “Did I get it?”

_ Why is he looking at Poe like that?  _ wonders Rey. 

Finn touches a hand to his head. “Oh man, something weird is going on.” The sensation of concern from both of his friends radiates in him. He can sense their moods somehow. He looks around the cafeteria. The small amount of people here are no longer paying attention to them, but he can still sort of feel that they’re there. It’s like feeling watched, a hyper-awareness of the actions of others. He whispers, “I can hear Poe’s thoughts.” The slight panic tinge to his words is embarrassing. 

“Bullshit,” replies Poe. Finn can feel the skepticism. Again, it feels like his own.

“I can feel… stuff too, like… the other people being alive.” Finn hates when he sounds like an idiot. Poe’s always reminding him that he just has catching up to do and he sees a demonstration of that with Rey who may adapt at light speed to everything new, but still has to learn about it first. In fact, at the moment, Rey’s using her crazy high-speed brain to figure out what Finn’s talking about. He can hear her thinking, but it’s not really words, just fevered mumbles. He gets the overall sense of a figurative math problem, numbers being divided and subtracted. “Follow me,” she commands, storming out of the cafeteria with determination. 

Poe gives him a shrug.  _ I guess we’re following her, then. _ He hears it, but Finn would have already known the words behind that expression anyway. 

She leads the two of them to a disused conference room not far from the mess hall. It’s meant to hold at least 100 people, mostly soldiers. A holographic projector in the center of the room waits to spring to life, to provide pivotal battle information: schematics, maps, and profiles. Little chairs (everything is in miniature on this ship for efficiency’s sake) form circles around it. Rather than take a chair, Rey sits atop one of the tables. 

Finn can hear the whispers of what she’s planning to say and can sense Poe’s bewilderment and the annoyance at being so. 

“Last night I went to see the scientists who created the Force Dampener. I told them about my being unable to connect with the Force.” Finn gets an image in his head of her crying, feels her embarrassment at doing it in front of someone. “They got Leia’s permission to reverse the Dampener.” She pulls the device out of her outfit. It looks unassuming, the little metal rod, yet she holds it as reverently as the holiest of religious icons. “It worked.” She smiles. “It’s now an amplifier of the Force.”

Poe asks, “So, this thing turned up your Force volume?” 

She nods, excitedly. “Yes! I can tap into the Force again. Maybe not the way I could before, but it works. It feels natural, too.”

It’s been pretty miserable watching Rey go through each day with the weight of her loss and seeing her happy, whole again is a beautiful thing, like Rey herself. “That’s great,” Finn says. They share a moment of smiling understanding.

“But it has a two meter radius,” she says, returning to a more explanatory tone. “It amplifies Force powers for anyone within two meters! Finn, you must be Force sensitive!”

Skepticism again from Poe; No, that’s coming from both Poe and him. He shakes his head. “No, stormtroopers are tested for Force sensitivity. I never showed any. They wouldn’t have let me get that far in training if I did.”

She’s keen for him to believe her, for this to be true. “Maybe you were just too weak.”

_ Ha. _ That was from Poe and it earns him a glare from Finn.

Rey continues, unaware of the psychic teasing. “After all, I was completely disconnected from it before they made their modifications.”

“I don’t know Rey, I don’t think so. Maybe it’s just you putting off some Force vibes. Poe, you hearing anything in your head?”

Poe looks caught out for a second. He makes a “hell if I know” face. “I’m not hearing any voices, no.”

_ What about now? _ Finn thinks.

_ I heard that  _ thinks Rey.

_ Well of course YOU did. What about Poe? _

“You guys are thinking things at me, aren’t you?” asks Poe. 

Rey gestures to the pilot. “See? He’s not able to hear anything, but you are.”

There’s a creepy crawly feeling on Finn’s skin at the implication. He wants to brush it off like he would a bug. They don’t make Force-sensitive people stormtroopers. They would be far too dangerous for both their powers and their individuality. There’s a part of him that’s afraid his captain will find out, that he’ll go missing if this gets back to someone like Phasma. “Well, I don’t want to hear anything.”

“Hey, try and lift something, man!”

“Shut up,” Finn snaps at Poe.

“It’ll go away as soon as I’m two meters from you.”

They’re speaking in rushed whispers, despite being behind the thick conference room doors. The excitement in Rey and Poe’s voices is much different than the panicked excitement he hears in his own. “Well, can you make it go away while being within two meters?”

_ Is he scared? _ Poe wonders.

“I could turn it off, but I’m not going to. I’ll be going to tell Leia it worked anyway.”

Finn addresses Poe with “No, I’m not” before answering Rey who is hurt that he wants the machine to stop making his life even more chaotic than it already is. “Hey, no, I’m happy it’s working. It’s just… there’s a lot of words and feelings up here that aren’t mine.”

She smiles gratefully that he’s still happy for her. She puts the amplifier away. “Maybe Hayfa and Rolli can turn down the radius. Or maybe you can learn how to control it.” She feels the strong force of his hell no, said simply and resoundingly in telepathy and facial expression, and nods. “We’ll try to get the radius turned down.”

_ Staying away from you is not an option _ he feels himself accidentally convey to her through the connection. He slaps his hands on his hand and jumps back, walking a few steps more.  _ No no no, la la la. You can’t hear me! You can’t hear me!  _

Appropriately, Rey and Poe stare at him like he’s a complete moron. He is, at this moment, so it’s fair. But, he’s far back enough that things are feeling normal. If he closed his eyes, he would barely even be able to tell that there was anyone else in the room, their presences no longer vibrating in his mind. He’s glad he can’t tell what either of them is thinking. “I’m just gonna hang back here.”

Rey sighs and turns to Poe. “Would you like to come with me when I tell Leia?”

“Nah, I think me and the Jedi master here will finish our breakfasts, but hey,” he reaches out and strokes her upper arm. “We’re happy for you.” 

She hugs him and then, with a nod to Finn, practically skips out of the room. 

The look that Poe gives him makes him feel sheepish, so he ambles back with his shoulders back and chin up, attempting to save some of his ego. They stand around the projector in the dimly lit room. “The Force is weird,” mutters Finn. He hopes it doesn’t happen again the next time he’s within range of her new Force hearing aid. 

Poe just grins and, mercifully, Finn can’t hear any of his thoughts on the subject.

* * *

  
  


“I recommended that a colleague of mine stop by to visit you tomorrow. His name is Marshall.” Dr. Boccaree has her gloved hands on the formerly shattered hip. She’s been palpating him for at least ten minutes and Hux doesn’t understand what her hands could be telling her that the computers around them can’t. Still, she’d saved his life, so his humiliation about being flopped around like an irritable doll and studied is tempered. He’s on his side now at least; she seems to recognize how uncomfortable he is on his stomach, though it would probably be easiest in that position.

There’s something about her voice, a forced casualness, that catches his attention. Why would another doctor’s visit be something objectionable? Perhaps she worries that he’ll feel betrayed if she offloads the burden of his care to another medical professional. If so, she needn’t; she’s done a fine job with his care, but he doubts that she’s the only competent doctor on board.

Finding whatever it was she hoped to find, he watches her bear down with her thumb harder. She would be amazing to watch actually performing a surgery, slender fingers wielding the pinpointed laser with precision. He almost wishes he’d been able to see his own. 

“I would rather you not mention it outright to the council members.” She looks up from the immobile lower body and at his risen eyebrow. “Oh, this isn’t subterfuge or anything like that. The guard records all comings and goings here anyway. I would just rather have him meet with you before seeking out their approval for any extended care.”

There’s dishonesty in what she’s telling him. Whether a full-on lie or an untruth by omission, he can’t tell, but he doubts, with her healer’s code of ethics, that it’s actually a threat to his personal safety. With this in mind, he still digs a little deeper, more interested in knowing why she’s lying than what about. “And what is he meant to see that you might overlook?”

Dr. Boccaree smiles. “You are sharper than my finest laser scalpel.” 

Hux doesn’t trust compliments; he refuses this one’s landing, and it flitters off to be lost to the air in the room. She doesn’t answer the question right away. Instead, she finishes up her exam, replacing the surprisingly warm but thin beige blanket over him. The gesture of her removing the gloves is his cue to settle back into a sitting position in the bed. She tosses them into a small disposal bin nearby and half smiles at him. “Marshall’s a therapist.”

“Unnecessary,” he replies instantly.

“And that’s a totally normal response after what you’ve been through.”

“The crash? Well, you know what they say, any crash you can walk away from…” he jokes darkly. He’s proving her point, isn’t he? Gallows humor is a defence mechanism. 

“I know therapy sounds threatening to you,” she continues, “but it could be helpful for your mood. And…” she pauses a bit, speaks lower. “For your nightmares.”

Of course they’ve been monitoring his sleep patterns, know that everytime he sleeps more than an hour, bright red terror flicks on like a heat lamp in his brain, burning him up from the inside out. Well, their machines can’t see the contents of his mind. That’s what the psychiatrist is for, to find out what keeps the murderer of the Hosnian system awake at night. He’d rather die than let someone crawl around in there and take a magnifying glass to the images. 

“Just try the one visit. You can feel each other out and decide if you want him to assist you in what you’re going through.”

His whole life has been a testimony to how much pyschological torture he can withstand, but her assessment is correct: he’s never been so vulnerable mentally as he is now. If they press him, he may break. He may break anyway. The shattering never feels far away.

“Perhaps,” he says, switching to an offensive stance. “You have another colleague that can assist me in walking, as any competent doctor should be able to do?”

Hux can’t tell if the barb lands. She looks worried about him as she always does, no more, no less. “He’ll be here at 11 tomorrow. Just, consider talking to him. You’re under no obligation.” A more upbeat, less cajoling tone returns to her voice. “Otherwise, your healing seems to have reached where it needs to be for physical therapy to start. It might take four or five days to find time in my schedule to start that with you, but if you have patience…”

He interrupts her. “I may already be on the block by then, but I appreciate the offer.” 

That does bother her. Good to know that his potential impending death bothers someone other than his reflection. “I…” she stops. She can’t make him promises, but she’s kind so she wants to. Kindness never gets anyone anything but exploited. “Have a good day, Hux. I’ll see you soon.”

He gives her a nod as she leaves. 

That short visit was the only thing that will happen today unless he gets another surprise interview from Holdo. He never thought he would ever be bored. On board the Finalizer, his schedule is full from the moment that he opens his eyes, sometimes earlier. He’d underestimated how frustrating boredom is. He glares at the electronic monitor. In a very soft voice, softer than the guard can hear, he chides it. “You told them about my dreams. You shall be depowered for your betrayal, as soon as I am able to do the deed myself.”

He isn’t mad, but he’s trying it on occasionally, to see if it fits. He’d spoken to his pillow yesterday, cursing its inability to retain its shape. It hadn’t felt natural. His preliminary hypothesis is that insanity cannot be forced through strange actions. If he could, it would be an interesting puzzle to give to this Marshall person. Try and execute your own mentally unwell spy, General Leia Organa, he dares. Alas, he’s not certifiably insane and his treachery never belonged to Organa. 

* * *

  
  


Finding General Leia with the Force is like feeling the west-facing side of rock on Jakku, the warmth radiating long after the sun has set. It’s fainter now, with her reliance upon the amplifier rather than her natural talents, but in no time, she makes her way to one of the Raddus’s many athletics facilities. There she finds Leia, face pink with exertion, shuffling along on a stationary running machine. There are circles of sweat beneath the loose sleeves of her top. It’s a much different portrait than the one that her master had made the first time they’d met, but she’s come to find that while she’s better than many people she’s met, Leia is still human. 

“I felt you coming to me,” pants Leia, stepping off the machine and wiping at her forehead with the back of her hand. “They were successful then?”

Rey nods fervently and bites at her lower lip. “It works.”

“Oh, I’m so glad to hear that.” She steps toward Rey who jumps back quickly. With a quick look down at herself, Leia says, “Sorry, I guess I am a bit...sweaty.”

Rey shakes her head, horrified that she’d given the wrong impression. “No! It’s not that. It has a field of effect - about two meters. I don’t know what it would do if I got too close to a Force Adept…an active Force Adept.” With how strongly it worked on Finn, who claimed no sensitivity at all, Rey could see this being dangerous to someone like Leia who, while no Kylo Ren, is one of the few powerful Force Adepts left in the galaxy.

Hayfa will totally want to test this out on Leia again (she’d offered the scientist exactly fifteen minutes of her time to make sure that the dampening was effective on all Force sensitives and not just Rey) now that it’s polarity has been reversed. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to test it out now, just the two of them. Mustering up her courage, Rey pulls out the amplifier and switches it off. Immediately, quiet and isolation returns. How could she have ever thought this, this not feeling the person beside her, was normal? 

As usual, Leia catches up quickly, embarrassment quickly switching to practical curiosity. “I see. That raises some possibilities that I’m sure Amilyn will be interested in exploring. I’ve been meaning to speak with you. Would you accompany me back to my quarters?”

Once in Leia’s quarters, she takes up a spot on her favorite couch, a comfortable tan one with padded armrests that she likes to throw her legs over; she doesn’t do so now because she’s too anxious and still too excited, though the lack of sleep the previous night is starting to catch up. 

Leia sits heavily next to her, exhaling loudly as she does. “Doctor Aghari has been at me lately about my weight. It’s like he doesn’t even realize how hard it is to stay in shape on a starship,” she complains. “You’d think walking from one end of this damned thing to the other every day would do it.”

Walking on the ship is so much easier than sand that Rey feels she could run its full distance several times before running out of steam, but then, she’s significantly younger than her master. So far, she’s only used the aquatic center. Learning to swim has been one of her favorite new things. Finn had kept her afloat the first few times and he’d been amazed at her innate lack of buoyancy. Rey was designed much more like an anchor. She’d gotten better though, and even with how terrifying the water had been, she’d loved the feel of it, still does, and she’s still in awe at the amount of water wasted just for the extravagance of recreation. 

“So, Rey, I wanted to talk to you about your visits to Hux.” 

It’s a bad sign that she feels immediately on guard. She shouldn’t have to feel defensive or guilty about the things she’s doing, not with these people who love her.

Leia takes her hand. “Hey, I’m not going to tell you what to do. You’re an independent powerful young woman.” Rey can feel her cheeks burn at the unexpected compliment. Most of the time she feels like a bumbling fool; it’s good to know that isn’t how she’s being perceived. “Is there something that you’re seeing in him that we can’t?”

The trust in her question is heart-breaking. She’s not forbidding the acquaintance and she’s not accusing Rey of naivety. This is why she feels so safe with Leia. “I don’t know,” she answers honestly. “I’m not sure how much of why I’ve been going to see him is about him. I haven’t felt like myself lately and he doesn’t either. We’re… broken.”

Leia nods as though she understands, not that she could, but at least she’s listening. “But he is different than I expected. At first I was shocked that he was helping me on his ship, but now, I think he might have anyway. The firing of Starkiller… it was horrible, the worst thing ever done, but… I don’t think he did it for himself and I don’t think he was the same after that. He’s embarrassed by sentiment but he also shows kindness.”

She’s rambling. The truth is that she’s had so little resources available to her to try and figure him out. She’s only had to listen to his words and his actions. She can’t feel any dishonesty with her Force connection severed and she can’t really reason because her head won’t allow even the simplest of concepts lately. She could be misreading him completely. But he had read to her and he had done it for over an hour, pretty words that had formed images in her head. She’d gone to sleep with imagined birds and fish and flowers easing her into the nightmares that waited below to ensnare her. And he had told her not to fall asleep on the ship and he’d told her she should listen to her doctor’s recommendations. There were these little things, these thoughtful things.

“You feel a connection because of what you both endured on that ship,” suggests Leia, offering up the explanation as she might an hors d'oeuvres. 

“Yes,” says Rey, taking it. There’s more though, something about how damaged he is and how she can’t really stay away from wreckage. 

Leia smiles. “Then that connection sounds like plenty of reason to want to explore who a person is.” Then, hesitating, she looks around at the quarters. Rey instinctively and pointlessly tries to reach out with the Force to feel her mood. No, she has to figure things out for herself when the amplifier is off. Leia wants to caution her; that’s her best guess. Finally, she looks back to Rey and releases her hand. “The Tribunal will meet in two days. That verdict might not go well for him.”

“But he has been spying for the Resistance, you said that yourself.”

“Yes, and he was the general in charge of Starkiller Base.” There’s no malice in Leia’s words, just a tired statement of fact. “We council members will be weighing both, and I’ve got to say, that’s a lot of weight on one scale.”

Rey swallows. She doesn’t want Hux to be executed. “It doesn’t feel like justice, killing him when he’s already…” She stops. She doesn’t want to call him powerless, not even here where he can’t hear it. 

Leia nods. “I want this to go fairly. It’s one of the reasons why I’m asking you what you see down inside of him.”

Rey’s hand drifts to the amplifier, tightens around it. She hasn’t been able to listen with all her senses to who the fallen general is, but she can now. 

“And one of the reasons why I want you there. You seem to have forgiven him for abducting you and causing your impairment.”

“That wasn’t him,” defends Rey. “Whatever crimes he’s responsible for, that’s not one. He didn’t want me on that ship. He was terrified that they grabbed me.” 

Leia sighs. “Not everyone could see it that clearly. I’m glad you know what you’re doing.” 

She wants to blurt out that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, but she doesn’t want to scare Leia with that bit of truth. She only knows that she hasn’t written the former First Order general off, whether there’s wisdom to it or not.

* * *

  
  


Hux is trying to explode someone with his mind. Back when he’d learned firsthand that the Force was indeed real, he’d been tempted to indulge in flights of fancy that had dared to enter his mind, things like this - willing someone to spontaneously erupt from the inside out, but had chided himself for it. Well, he has no one to impress here, so he stares at the blue slick-bottomed shoes and wishes. He’s not Ren. He’s not Rey. He’s a pathetic military twit who cowered in daddy’s shadow most of his life. So, his attempt is not successful. He sighs. “I have no intention of diving into my psyche with you,” he admits, unable to meet the ridiculous man’s gaze. “Not that I don’t appreciate the gesture.”

He actually does, too, at least as far as the visit represents Dr. Boccaree’s concern for him. He suspects that she truly believes that therapy is in his best interest, that she is unaware that sending someone to psychologically meddle with a soldier after trauma is just reprogramming under the guise of care. In her mind, devoting himself whole-heartedly to the obsolete cause of the Resistance would be the best thing to ease his conscience, not a betrayal of all of the values that were instilled in him by the First Order and, in particular, Brendol Hux. Oh, he’s not immune to indoctrination; his father’s fears and preferences are stamped onto him in a more permanent and obvious way than a tattoo of the brightest ink, but he can see the truth that Dr. Boccaree can’t: he has no conscience to ease and the reinstatement of the Republic, the stated goal of these rebels, won’t make the galaxy any safer. There are always, will always be, people who wield power and an exponentially greater number of people who will suffer because of it.

But, whatever apprehension Hux had about inadvertently blurting out all of his secrets due to his newfound lackadaisical attitude combined with the long periods of isolation and boredom, had vanished the instant that Marshall (Hux isn’t sure whether it’s his first, last, or only name) had walked in. There would be no tearjerker stories of child abuse, no self-recriminations for war crimes, no offerings of intelligence available only to those in high-ranking flagship positions. Dr. Boccaree had sent him a clown. From his orange and green top of intermingled circles and stripes to the loose red pants with embroidered flowers up the outer sides to those damnable shoes which he had kicked up onto the bed that had served as Hux’s for the last week, nothing about this man endeared him to Hux. 

“That’s okay. You wanna talk about everyday things?” asks Marshall nonchalantly because everything he does is nonchalant.

As of right now, Hux’s ‘every day’ involves lying in bed trying not to fall asleep lest the nightmares come, further tipping off his captors to his unconscious inner workings; hoping that he’ll receive a visit from the doctor or the scavenger; Trauri checking his vitals, replacing his waste tubes and containers, and assisting him in changing his clothes; and dreading his upcoming trial. With that kind of riveting daily itinerary, it’s no wonder he just keeps his mouth shut.

“I’ll start us off,” Marshall says. Oh, for the love of Saraboth. The man actually puts his arms behind his head as though he’s sunbathing on the beach of Kachirho. Hux is used to hating people very quickly and this is yet one more he must add to his list. “I always have a cup of caf first thing in the morning. I like it black, nothing added, but here on this ship? Man, I have to mask the flavor with something cause I swear I can taste how long the beans have been sitting in a cargo hold somewhere. So, even though I like it bitter, I add some milk and the shavings of Durmic bark. How do you take yours?”

A long moment passes between them before Hux finally asks, “Are you quite sure you’re a doctor?”

Marshall laughs, as unbothered by the insult as he is by sticking his dirty feet on someone else’s place of recovery. “Well, you don’t want to dive into your psyche with me and you think talking about lighter topics is unprofessional. That puts me in a tricky place as to how we’re going to pass the time.” His eyes are reddish and his skin has a scaly quality to it, but other elements seem very human; Hux suspects Chiss ancestry, though where the curly bifurcated ears (adorned with no less than nine gold hoops) came in, he couldn’t begin to guess. Either way, the red eyes sparkle with amusement. He warrants they probably do that often. “Is there anything we could talk about that wouldn’t make you uncomfortable...or make you think I’m an idiot?”

Hux scowls. “Nothing that comes to mind.”

“No problem then. Say, have you met the guard outside?”

Hux can’t abide small talk. He draws his crossed arms in closer to himself. He doesn’t even remember having wrapped himself up this way. He must be sending tremendous amounts of kinesthetic cues to this slob masquerading as a therapist. 

“They probably don’t talk much to you, then?” Marshall waits the appropriate amount of time before continuing on as though he’d received a response. “I did some security work when I was a teenager. Nothing as important as looking after someone like you, of course. I had a lot of downtime to read, though, so it wasn’t bad.”

“Fascinating,” Hux deadpans. 

“Have you always been in the military?”

A memory pops into his head, an unwelcome one, but then aren’t they all? His nanny, Cormesa, laying out his academy uniform for the very first time. She’d said something about how he’d be wearing that from now on, as though he didn’t already know. He’d seen older boys in their uniforms and known what was coming, knew that his father was starting him in training younger than any of the others. Brendol told him he’d need to start sooner because he would screw up otherwise. He was too stupid, too weak. Even with the extra training, he’d never be a good soldier. Hux wasn’t sure he believed his father, having already observed the way his father lied to everyone around him (that he also lied to himself Hux would find out years later when he could understand such concepts). Little Armitage knew that the words hurt him and that the uniform, crisp and dull in color, scared him. He hadn’t wanted to touch it, to accept what it meant. 

He’s been quiet long enough that Marshall should be asking another question, but instead, those red eyes are staring at the wall, as though they have all the time in the world or like he hadn’t actually been wondering. Because the therapist doesn’t conduct himself properly, Hux can’t predict him, a rarity which disturbs him. 

“How long is this session?” Hux asks.

Marshall shrugs. “I wouldn’t call this a session. Ginevra just wanted me to stop in, see if maybe you felt like offloading a bit.”

Ginevra. Pretty name, he thinks, one that suits Dr. Boccaree. Still, it makes him feel awkward to have learned it from this man instead of her, like he’s just been entrusted a secret he hadn’t asked for.

“I’ve gotta say, I think it was a good call.”

Is this how Marshall’s sessions tend to go, then? His patients staring at his shoes and garish apparel thinking that he’s an overly talkative moron? “Because this has been such a productive dialogue?” he snaps.

Marshall laughs. “I get it. You don’t think I’m a good fit for you. And hey, maybe you would do better with someone else. Maybe someone less… friendly, but…” Here he finally puts his arms down and gives a smile. “I want to help and I’ve got some time for you, even if it’s just to have you put me down, man. I’d rather you be shooting that anger my way than in here.” He gestures towards his heart. 

Overall, Hux thinks he’s behaved pretty well towards this clown. He’s been doing it for Dr. Boccaree’s sake; it hadn’t occurred to him that maybe this guy has a stake in helping him too. He really can’t stand do-gooders. They put obligations onto him that he doesn’t want. Part of him wants to explain all this to Marshall, tell him that it’s not his fault that he’s showing some interest in Hux’s wellbeing. Instead, wisely, he keeps his mouth shut.

“Do you want to hear about the time that I had to run away from a wampa?” offers Marshall.

“No.”

“Well, in that case, let me just tell you about what PTSD symptoms are like.”

PTSD. Hux hates that acronym and hates the man for using it. Oh, these mental health practitioners like to think that everyone can be fixed if they just follow the proper steps, that every person will fit neatly into whatever category of mental disorder or distress they choose to put them in. They can tattoo their patient with those four letters and put the onus back on them. ‘You came to me for a diagnosis. Well, there it is. Do something with it.’ He’d rather hear about the wampa.

“I’d rather you not.” 

“Hey, I had to learn it in school, and now’s as good as a time as ever for me to teach it to you. FIrst, you’ve got the re-experiencing symptoms. That’s the flashbacks, intrusive thoughts,  _ nightmares _ …” He emphasizes nightmares to indicate that Dr. Boccaree had at least given him that much information.

“I know what the symptoms of PTSD are. I command over 75,000 military men. Do you really think I could do that and still be unaware of what PTSD is?” He wants to throttle this idiot, this clown who had been so inappropriately referred to him. 

“Then you’ve got the arousal symptoms. That’s jumpiness, tension,  _ bursts of anger _ .” Marshall doesn’t look at all bothered by Hux’s slitted glare. “Avoidance symptoms - that’s pretty self-explanatory. The cognitive stuff - forgetfulness, loss of interest, negative thoughts like suicidal ideation, and guilt.

“It’s not a comprehensive list, but these are a lot of the things that patients of mine with PTSD deal with. It’s not pleasant, but it’s how humans can deal with the bad things that happen to them. It’s not a weakness anymore than your pupils contracting to block a bright light. It’s just the brain looking out for itself the best way it knows how and the rest of the body working to catch up with the signals it’s getting.”

Hux deliberately doesn’t respond. He’s already told this moron that he knows all this, though he does disagree with it not being a weakness. He’s had to scrap too many troopers who come back with broken brains, men and women too scared to even fire a blaster again.

“So, that’s the basics of that. Too bad I can’t give you a degree now.” He laughs. “Don’t suppose you wanna share how many of those ring a bell for you?”

Hux fixes him with a flat look.

Marshall holds out his hands in a surrender gesture. “Okay, okay. You wanna tell me how they’re treating you here?” After another pause for a reaction, he asks, “My Wampa story?”

“No.”

“Did you want to tell me what an idiot I am?”

“I’m sure you can find many others willing to do so.”

The therapist throws back his head and laughs hard. “Oh, that was good. I like you Hux. Well, how about I throw just a few more factoids at you and then I’ll let you get back to your day?” He doesn’t wait for a response this time, a small sliver of professionalism driving his words. “If the trauma is recent, those reactions, the avoidance and the memory loss and all that, they’re helping out, keeping a person’s brain from tackling too much all at once. Let’s say someone’s got a closet and it’s all nice and organized (so you know that I’m not talking about my own closet, right?) and then someone tosses that guy a blanket and it’s all covered in Cacta bush thorns and they say “Quick, put this in your cupboard!” Well, the guy shoves the blanket in but it won’t close right so he has to lean on it to keep it in there. That pointy blanket is the bad experience and sooner or later he’s gonna have to deal with it, but by waiting a bit, he can either go get some heavy duty gloves or he can enlist a friend’s help. He’ll get that cleaned out when he can handle it. You know, when he’s prepared. Also, when the danger has passed - when those thorns aren’t covering him.”

Hux knows it’s a metaphor, but it feels like a bad one because there’s too many holes, the primary one being this one: “People don’t throw thorn-covered blankets at each other.”

“No?” asks Marshall. He rubs a thumb along the underside of his chin, scratching an itch there. “I think I wouldn’t get as many appointments if that was true.”

Hux frowns. He doesn’t have a thorny cupboard. He has a wrecked ship and a wrecked career and a wrecked body. He doesn’t say this, but he thinks it, loudly. Part of him wants to yell that this Marshall character couldn’t possibly understand, but most of him knows how it would sound. Typical. A cliche of a PTSD patient. 

“Well, anyway, so, stupid metaphor or not, whether that guy needs me to give him gloves or to go through the cupboad with him, I’m available for it. That’s what I’m for.” He pulls a plastic disc from his pocket. “Normally this is where I’d give you this, with my contact info, but this isn’t exactly a normal situation, so how about I do it to ease my own OCD and you just let Ginevra know if you need me before Zhellday.”

Zhellday. Marshall has deliberately set his next appointment for the day after Hux’s tribunal. If Hux lives, he’ll have to see about cancelling that. 

Finally the blue shoes leave the sheets as the strange man gets up. He looks around first, as if seeing if he left anything other than his business card, then at Hux. “Nice meeting ya, Hux. I’ll see you soon.”

“Thanks for coming,” Hux says. He’d meant it to sound cold, brusque, but it just sounds genuine.

* * *

  
  


Rey feels the essence of Hux for the first time. She’s not even in the room with him when she does and she savors the unique experience of a new dimension being added onto someone she already knows as she walks closer. It’s like she’s now able to smell him or hear him, but something that gets more to the core of who he is than what shampoo he washes with or what insults he uses. It feels tight and restrained, like he’s only begrudgingly sharing the universal interconnectedness. It suits him, totally fits how she’s judged him with only her five senses before. She gives a hush gesture to Beaumont, his guard for this shift, as she approaches. She tips her head around the door frame and looks in. Hux is reading, the datapad held up on his knees, chin resting on interlaced fingers. He looks engrossed but she knows better, unless he’s finally found a book more to his taste than the one he’d read to her the other day. 

“Enjoying your book?” she asks.

“Scavenger!” he greets.

She feels a brightening in him like a lamp springing into life with a warm glow. This combined with the cheerful tone, one that she didn’t know that General Hux was capable of adopting, surprises her. 

She shakes her head, approaching the bed. “Rey,” she corrects, drawing the name out slowly as though speaking to a child. “My name is Rey.”

“So it is,” he says with a sparkle in the form of a challenge in his eyes. He’s in a good mood. This is either the first time he’s been in one since she’s been coming, or the first time she’s been able to tell.

“It’s easier to say than scavenger.”

“Two less syllables,” he agrees.

She shakes her head, giving up. He’s not as in the middle of the bed this time, so she sits on the side with more room, the one away from the door. “Did I miss anything the last two days?”

“As a matter of fact, something did happen.” He pauses dramatically as she raises her eyebrows clearly waiting. “I met the most absurd person aboard this ship.”

She tilts her head, thinking. “Corgo?” she asks, flipping her hands beneath her chin in what must be a culturally insensitive approximation of his tentacles.

Hux’s eyes widen and a bark of a laugh pops out of his chest. She’s never made him laugh before. It’s a rewarding feeling, like doing the impossible. His composure immediately returns, but she’s still heard it and can still see the traces of smile in the corners of his mouth. “No, actually, though I will say I don’t think the illustrious Cogtho Zanbre would be pleased that you forgot his name.”

“Cogtho…” she repeats. It was close enough to what she’d said. “At least I didn’t call him Scavenger.”

Hux ignores this. “The absurd person I met today was Marshall.”

If she’s met a Marshall, she can’t remember one, but then, she has met so many new people since she joined the Resistance. “I don’t think I know him.”

“Oh, you would remember.”

She shrugs. “With the way my memory has been…”

He interrupts. “You would remember.” 

She laughs at his insistence. “And why was this absurd person visiting you?

“That’s irrelevant, and not nearly as humorous as his appearance. I encourage you to seek him out immediately. And, you must then report back to me with a misremembered name for him as well.”

“I think I can remember Marshall.”

“It has the same amount of syllables as Cogtho, and we see how well you’ve retained that.”

Hux’s mischievousness delights her and she laughs again, harder. It puts a slight pressure on her head, but it feels nice to do after so long. “It’s rude to make fun of head trauma victims,” she teases. “Besides, I’m doing much better these days, or hadn’t you noticed?”

He studies her, his eyebrows drawing downward and together. “You do seem… lighter.” 

She points to his datapad. “What were you reading? When I came in?”

He grimaces. “Bardottan philosophical ramblings about morality.”

Rey has no idea who the Bardottans are, but then, she feels ignorant about almost anything having to do with all the books he has on that datapad. There’s more culture in one byte of information than she has in her whole body. She just knows this stuff isn’t new to him either. He seems refined anyway, like he could just give a literary critique of any novel or poetry without even reading it. It does seem odd that a man responsible for so much misery and death would be reading about morality. “What do the Bardottans consider moral?” 

“Oh, peace and meditation nonsense, things that don’t actually better their own lives or those around them, but what  _ is _ interesting is who they were before they came to their conclusions about morality.” He becomes animated when he’s talking about this, passion creeping around behind his words. He could have been a teacher, she thinks. It could have saved a trillion lives. But could it have? Or would it just have been another uniformed man up there yelling to push the button? “You see, the Bardottans used to be incredibly violent and cruel, striving to create reputations for savagery. One Bardottan, Chaiyo No, was esteemed for having kept an enemy in a constant state of torture for 7 months.”

She reacts appropriately, making a face of disgust and wishing he’d move on to the peace and meditation nonsense. That sounded much more palatable.

“What changed them?” she asks. 

“The Dagoyans took over, mostly through ideological means rather than brute force, though there was some of that as well. Eventually, they brainwashed all of their kind to think that peace was the end all solution, and their days of violence were left behind. So, spending time writing about morality is about all the Bardottans do, which is why there is so kriffing much available on this datapad.”

Rey smiles and shrugs. “I’m sorry that they couldn’t have stayed war-like for your entertainment.” 

With the little bit of extra room, she finds that she can fold her legs under her ankles crossed. She’s very slightly touching Hux’s leg, but he’s under a blanket, so it isn’t inappropriate. The ship doesn’t explode because she has and, more importantly, neither does Hux having observed the contact. 

His beard is growing in, red prickles jutting everywhere. It gives an artificial warmth to his face, hiding the coldness beneath it. If left to grow long enough, his beard will attach to his sideburns. Then he’ll look more like someone’s uncle than a mass murderer. “I hope my hair grows back as quickly as your beard.”

He colors slightly, perhaps embarrassed to have his personal appearance commented on when he’s in no position to make changes to it. “I had noticed you’re still wearing that unfortunate hat.”

“And will continue to do so until my hair returns,” she says sharply, brooking no room for mockery. “And Finn made it.” She pulls the cap off, looks down at the soft, albeit ugly thing, and smiles. “It’s gaberwool. Kaydel taught him to knit a couple months ago.” She pets it.

She feels something through the force then, a longing. Something about the hat had triggered a memory in Hux. She focuses on the sensation, clearly invading his privacy but unable to resist the opening. A coat. He has a gaberwool coat. He’d bought it for formal events. It makes him feel regal, but warm too, because so much of his time on the ship, the Finalizer, is cold. And, like the ship, he’s never going to see it again.

“Gaberwool is a sturdy material,” he says, noncommittally. 

If she couldn’t feel it with her artificially returned sense, she would never know he was anything less than bored with their conversation. He’s so good at that cold, unfeeling facade. He had to be though, to do the things he’s done. He’s pushed the emotions down someplace very tiny, perhaps so small that he might never find them again. Yet, they come out to find him when he sleeps, when he’s too tired to push, thorny blankets in his closet.

She’s gone too far into his mind and she pulls back, feeling overwhelmed by the sensation of being in his head and tremendously guilty. She has trouble meeting his eyes as she continues making conversation. “Do you know how to knit?” 

His tone is lower when he replies. “Why would I know such a thing?”

Rey shrugs. “Some people learn it from their grandparents or their parents while they’re young.”

_ Not all of us were as lonely as you were  _ she hears plain as day in her mind. Her eyes widen at the ugly thought and she looks in disbelief at the general. In his eyes and her mind she sees that he’s confirmed his suspicion. 

“When did your powers return, Scavenger?” 

She swallows hard. These are the cold eyes that had been cloaked in red as he told the galaxy it would bow before his regime. She’d done wrong, had already known it, even before this transformation erasing any progress they’d made towards mutuality. “They haven’t,” she says softly.

“And Greedo shot first,” he says.

“No, I mean, look…” she rifles around in her pockets and pulls out the Force Dampener. “They re-engineered it. It amplifies the Force now. I can connect with it only while this is on.” He doesn’t even glance at the device in her hand. She wants to take back the last few minutes, go back to that miraculous laugh, before she’d intruded and seen things she shouldn’t have. “I’m still learning how…” she starts to lie, but it dies on her tongue. Lying will only make her feel worse, and besides, she knows he’d be able to spot it anyway. She straightens her back, raises her chin, “I shouldn’t have don’t that. I’m sorry.”

After a long silence during which time his gaze never waivers and somehow never shows any emotion, he says, “Next time you’re trying to covertly rummage through someone’s head, I advise you to choose a target who hasn’t worked beside Kylo Ren.” 

It’s the first time that he’s mentioned the Dark Side user and even without prying, because she is definitely keeping her Force insight drawn as close to her as she can muster, she feels hate, the taste like copper on her tongue, radiating from him. It’s him, Rey realizes, Kylo Ren is why Hux was working with the Resistance. The enemy of his enemy. “I won’t do it again, not with you... not deliberately.”

The quiet between them isn’t comfortable and it lasts too long. She fiddles with the amplifier, turning it over and over in her hand while willing him to say something more, to say that he trusts her vow or accepts her apology. He doesn’t. His jab about her parents had hurt, more so hearing it in her head, than off his lips. He must have put so much intent behind the thought to make it resound so clearly to her. Reminding herself that she wouldn’t have heard it if she hadn’t been trying to listen doesn’t make it not sting. She breaks the silence softly. “Would you prefer if I go?”

She expects him to respond immediately with a yes, but he doesn’t. Instead, he’s thinking, which she finds encouraging. When he does reply, they’re still on the subject of Kylo Ren and she understands now that it’s one that he’s avoided, that it isn’t just coincidental that he’s never come up before. “He wants to make you his apprentice.”

She nods, slowly. “He told me on Ilum before the planet exploded. He can’t have me.” There had been a part of her, even having just watched him stab Han, that was tempted by his offer. She wanted to understand the things moving inside of her, the new connection she was feeling with the world around her, and she had been so kriffing lonely. His desire to train her, to bring out greater abilities from her, and the river of need she’d felt in him had given her pause even while being horrified with herself for letting it. But it hadn’t been with all of her heart that she’d felt that and certainly it had been none of her mind. In the end, there wasn’t any likelihood in that moment of her joining forces with him, and it’s that certainty that she puts behind her words to Hux now. “I’ve been training with General Leia, after Luke rejected me.” 

She’s still not visually picking up much about his mood, but at least he hasn’t said he wanted her to leave. “Is he why you were helping us?” 

“How big was the handful you took while you were in there?” he asks. The meanness in his tone makes her shiver. What he’s accusing her of is wrong. She wasn’t trying to find his secrets or maybe she had for a moment, but it wasn’t for Resistance information.   
“Nothing about that,” she answers. “Really. I’m just trying to understand you.” She tucks the amplifier away again and runs her free hands over her knees. It’s cold on ships, she agrees with the snatched thought of Hux’s, probably worse for her having lived for so long in the desert. It’s only habit that keeps her in this outfit, her only clothes before she’d joined the Resistance. “You’re difficult to get to know.”

“You’re an open book,” he says, quietly, but his tone isn’t snarky. 

“I know. I… as you so helpfully mentioned… didn’t grow up around many people. I didn’t have to pretend to be anything I wasn’t.” Theatrics is a recent concept to her, seeing people overreacting to things because others are around to see it. She could yell or cry on Jakku, but it didn’t benefit her to do so. Being angry at her parents didn’t bring them back and no one put warm food on her empty plate just because she was crying at the gnawing sensation in her belly. “So much of the way that people act is for the sake of others.”

“An astute observation.” He seems to genuinely agree with her. He’s calming, the anger at the spectre of Kylo Ren and at Rey’s intrusion into his mind dissipating. “And I meant what I said about being easy to read. It doesn’t take Force powers to see that you’re lonely. Otherwise, why would you be visiting a First Order prisoner?”

She shakes her head. “I  _ was _ lonely. I’m not now. I have a family here, friends. I have more than I ever thought I would.” There had been years when she’d imagined the life she’d have when her parents returned for her, the images so crystal clear that she could nearly drink the envisioned water and feel the security of their arms. The truth grew stronger and larger with her until she was only hoping on a very surface level, no more truly convinced that they would show up than that she would grow wings. “And I’m needed here.”

“No doubt your talents are useful to their endeavor.”

“It’s not like that!” She dislikes the defensive tone to her voice. “They’re not using me.” His eyes disagree but he remains silent. Even still, she argues with him, as though he had contradicted her. “Leia would have me stay on board even if I never got my powers back and Finn doesn’t even care that I have any. He cares about me for who I am...as a person.”

“You’re speaking of traitor FN-2187.”

She glares daggers at him. His people think it’s acceptable to give other human beings serial numbers as though they’re disposable weapons created in a factory. “His name is Finn. He always was a person. The first order just didn’t treat him like one. And you are in no position to judge a traitor.”

“I’m in no position to judge anyone,” answers Hux coolly. It isn’t an artificial humility, but a true lack of self-worth. Somehow she knows this is a new development, knows that he probably thought most highly of himself before being injured and incarcerated.

“And yet you judge everyone.”

A smile plays across his lips. “Old habits die hard, Scavenger.”

* * *

When Poe finds Finn, it’s with a hand full of cards and a face full of smugness. There’s eight of them loosely circled around an upside down bucket with a pile of nuts and bolts accumulating in the center, the poor mechanic’s gambling chips. It doesn’t matter what the stakes, the biggest draw is always pride anyway. Finn had started with neither the resources nor the reputation, and either, in any increment, means more to him than it could to the seven other Resistance members laughing and betting and cheating around him. 

It’s a shame he has to ruin that good mood.

“Hey!” shouts Finn having noticed Poe walk up. “You should play next game. I think I’ve got this one in the bag.”

“You always do,” complains Marna.

“Which is why no one wants to play Bluestar with you,” says Rickman, one of Poe’s better pilots. 

Finn’s smile widens. Accepting praise was definitely not something the ex-stormtrooper had needed to learn. ‘Cocky shit,’ thinks Poe fondly. He grabs a spare chair and scoots in between Finn and Marna.

He doesn’t interrupt the game, but also doesn’t join in for the next hand. His concerns aren’t time-sensitive and it’s fun to watch when Finn gets on this kind of roll, taunting his friends and showing off. After a while, though, Finn starts to notice that he’s not as boisterous as usual. Poe can tell the moment that he realizes it, because suddenly he’s all attentive and watchful, ready to go into ultra-caring nurture mode if it’s needed. Finn’s a hero for that, but then, he’s a hero for a lot of things.

“Hey, you okay?” whispers Finn.

“Yeah, just need to talk to you about something. Well, that sounded worse than it is… probably. I mean, maybe.” He should stop rambling before the guy thinks that he’s talking about something cataclysmic. “Just, you know, when you get a moment.”

“I’ve got a moment,” says Finn. “Hey guys! I think I’ve made you guys weep enough for tonight.”

“Aw, you’re out?” asks Rickman when he stands. He’s already offering a low hand for a goodbye slap. Finn drops one on him, lazy armed, and smiles. 

“Yeah, it is getting kinda late,” says Marna.

Poe hates being the asshat that ended the party. 

They walk together down one of the many long corridors that lead to Finn’s sleeping quarters. Sometimes when they walk, one will bump the other with an elbow, just to start shenanigans. They’re the same height, so it makes for some good random jabs. Tonight though, Finn’s just waiting to hear what’s going on and Poe’s worried that he’s gonna freak out.

“So, what did you wanna talk about?”

Poe takes a deep breath. “Okay, so you know your favorite person in the galaxy?”

“Rey…” 

It would have been nicer if Finn had guessed him, but the truth is sometimes a jerk. “Right. And you know your least favorite person in the galaxy?” 

Finn’s side-eyeing him. “Yes....”

“I think they’re becoming friends.”

The former stormtrooper’s boots squeak dramatically as he abruptly stops walking. It sounds loud in the quiet hallway. Yeah, that’s about the reaction that Poe’s expecting. Finn’s lips are alone are more expressive than most people’s faces and right now they’re set in a “you’re fucking kidding me” position that transmits just fine without words. His eyes say that he’s waiting to hear more. Poe scratches at the back of his neck. Maybe he should have sent Leia to do this.

“Rey’s been visiting him.”

“No,” says Finn with the kind of shake of his head a dog would be envious of. 

“Yeah.”

“No.” 

“Leia told me that the guards have reported that she’s visited Hux three times.” She’d only pulled him aside after Rey had so abruptly left the gathering in her quarters the other night. Poe doesn’t think she had any intention of telling him or Finn, though they’re the people that are closest to her, and therefore the best people to be in the know about what’s going on with her. But, seeing Rey’s erratic behavior, jumping up and leaving behind the other council members, Leia only then thought maybe she should be worried about her behavior following brain damage. Poe’s never been angry at Leia before, but he’s got a little now. She should have told them after the first report from the guard. He doesn’t see how anything good can come from extended contact with such a manipulative soulless son of a bitch.

“Why would she do that?” It’s probably a rhetorical question, but Poe answers anyway.

“My guess is she feels sorry for him, what with him being paralyzed and locked up in sickbay. You know how big of a heart she has, Finn. She wants to help everybody.” He’s preaching to the choir on that point, since he’s talking to a man with a heart you could make jewelry out of. 

“Right, so we need to talk to her about this right now.” His boots squeak again as he sets off to confront Rey. 

“Wait!” calls Poe following after. “Wait!” He puts a hand on his former jacket and Finn glares at him, shooting the messenger with metaphorical eye daggers. “Look, you can’t just tell her not to see him.”

“Really? Cause I think I can.” 

“Yeah? You’re telling me you think that Rey listens when you tell her not to do something? Is that what you’re telling me? Because I think it’s kind of the opposite.” Poe makes exaggerated hand gestures for emphasis. 

Finn’s nostrils are flared, and his cheeks puff out and then deflate. “Fine. No big deal. We’ll just go see him then.”

This time his shoes only squeak a little bit as he reverses his direction, heading toward the medbay. Poe shouts after him. “What are we going to do? Threaten to break his legs?!” He runs to catch up. When he does, he doesn’t even need to grab Finn this time because he stops on his own.

“Why didn’t she tell us?”

Poe’s certain of that one at least and he thinks that Finn does too. The three of them don’t keep many secrets from each other and Poe doubts that Finn and Rey have any. Hell, he’s slept over in Rey’s quarters before, though Poe is 99.9% sure that they’ve been friendly sleepovers. He’s probably hurt that Rey would keep something from him, especially something this big, even if she had to keep him from that hurt. 

A cleaning droid scuttles past them.

“I get it. I was pissed too, but the tribunal is tomorrow and this is probably not even something that we need to worry about after that.”

Finn shakes his head. “What tribunal?” 

Ah, no one has passed that one on to Finn. It’s not like Poe to forget what’s common knowledge and what’s come to him as one of Leia’s right hands. “Five of the high council are going to ask him questions about his spying and decide whether to lock him up or execute him or… let him walk, so to speak.”

“Let him walk!” Poe’s not sure that he’s seen Finn so angry. “Do you even know what that man is capable of? I mean, he’s already blown up 5 planets!

“Yeah, Finn. I know what he’s done and so does Leia. They’ll make the right call, whatever that is.” 

He might not trust the others but she sure as shit trusts Leia. Everyone knows what the Empire did to her planet. She’s not just going to let Hux go free; if she keeps him alive it will be because she thinks he can be useful to the Resistance and even then, he’d be willing to bet that it’s still from behind bars.

“Maybe it’s easy for you to trust them to do the right thing…” Finn trails off, his entire youth an unspoken example of why putting your faith in authority is a bad idea.

Poe puts a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I get it. I do. Leia’s not going to let him hurt anyone again.”

“When’s this tribunal?” Then, seeing the distrustful look on Poe’s face, he adds, “I want to talk to him before it. He needs a guard, right? Well, I volunteer.”

No conflict of interest there, putting an ex-stormtrooper in charge of bringing his former commanding officer to trial. Poe winces. “We’ll ask the general...Leia, we’ll ask Leia. No harm in asking.” For once, he hopes that she’ll turn down his request. 

The whole walk to Finn’s quarters, the two bitch about having gotten Hux off the downed craft. Then, in Finn’s quarters they speculate on what Rey and Hux could possibly have to talk about. The venting seems to help Finn calm down, anger level dropping from a 10 to a 5, which is still higher than Poe’s comfortable with but it’s a vast improvement. From there the conversation goes to Rey in general and then life as a Resistance fighter and what a change it is from Stormrooper, a discussion they’ve had many times, but needs to be had regularly for Finn’s sanity. As the hours drift closer to the start of the ship’s new day, Poe falls asleep on Finn’s couch, visions of stormtrooper barracks and dictatorial military leaders behind his eyes.


	5. Chapter 5

There’s a certain poetic justice to FN-2187 being one of his escorts to the tribunal. Hux appreciates some good old-fashioned irony and the universe accommodates his predilection rather more often than it statistically should. The other one, a blonde woman in her early 20s, keeps a blaster on him while the First Order traitor releases his manacles from the rod that has served as the perimeter of the world for the last 10 days. Finn, as Rey calls him (so much for civilian imagination) doesn’t make eye contact as he works and Hux is sure that there’s still fear there, still that ingrained deference that would be signaling to the former stormtrooper that what he’s doing is wrong. Good to know that Brendol’s programming is still somewhat effective even in this disobedient exception. Hux’s father would have been enraged that even one soldier defected, but given the sheer quantity of forced recruits, his record is still stellar.

This morning Trauri had assisted him into real clothes, actual pants and an oversized button up shirt, and his relief at not being thrust before a council in a medical gown had nearly overwhelmed him, even blurring his vision in an uncharacteristic outburst of gratitude. She hadn’t noticed because she too avoided his eyes. He’s beginning to feel a bit like Hematila, Saraboth’s dark diath who used her celestial aura to hypnotize worshippers of Toth, converting them against their wills. Are they afraid that just a look into his eyes will convert them to the First Order or are they afraid that they’ll see the trillion dead behind the green of his irises? They needn’t worry; the dead are much deeper inside of him than that. 

Finn links the manacles together and Hux regrets that he didn’t get to wave his hands around unrestrained while he still had the chance. He can’t risk taking any actions which could provide an excuse for shooting him dead. Something tells him that it wouldn’t take much. 

For several minutes they stand around, Finn and the other guard only giving each other occasional glances and floating none his way. Hux can guess what they’re waiting for, but he keeps silent. 

“What’s keeping Trauri?” mutters Finn. His complaint seemingly speeds up the process, as less than a minute later, the nurse returns with an hoverchair. 

“Sorry, I wasn’t even sure we had one. Newcastle had to put a new battery in it first.”

Her voice is higher and more childlike than Hux had been able to tell from her one word commands. She’s slight of build and while she must have some bravery to join a resistance movement, not to mention nursing him alone, seems like a timid mouse. 

Hux glares at the chair. It is old, stuffing in the seat fraying along its seams, oxidation slowly occurring around its handles. It’s emblematic of the type of life he’ll have if they don’t execute him. He hates it. He hates it more than he hates fermented porthomer eel roe or Gamorrean opera. When Trauri lifts him, shooing Finn away because this is her job, he wants to fight her, even with the waiting blaster consequence because he hates the chair so much. 

He doesn’t. He goes along with everything, as he has so far, because his will is a mote now, buried beneath the corpses of his aspirations. ‘You’ve earned this,’ comes a whisper from within. It would sound like Brendol if the man had been capable of speaking quieter than a barked command.

The technology keeping the chair afloat protests his weight, a low declining  _ beeewww _ sound, and the lights on its panels flicker. “Where did you find this thing?” he complains, unable to help himself. He’d intended to be stoic. 

“It’ll get you to the General,” says Trauri, but she doesn’t sound so sure. She looks at Finn. “If it doesn’t, you might need to get a dolly from one of the hangars.”

Hux laughs bitterly. This would be the way that his execution would go, wheeled in on a dolly, just some unworthy trash with no more dignity than travel luggage.

“Okay, come on,” says Finn. He sets the controls to manual and gives the chair a push. Surprisingly, it glides relatively smoothly and they make their way through the doorway into the hall.

Hux hasn’t exactly been able to roam this ship, hasn’t had any idea of its size or utility. The open hallways look into large barrack areas on occasion, so he can see the size of the rooms. They attract attention among the crew when they pass, but the faces are curious, not angry; this tribunal will be private, he notes. As it should be, he thinks. He admires the ship’s structure and her space allotment. He would love to know what kind of armament she has, and not in a First Order intelligence way, but just sheer curiosity. Every craft has its own nuance separate from any identical schematics that it may share with other models. He’s curious to know her, to feel her temperament. He lets guesses about the ship’s complement and capabilities distract him from the fear that tightens his esophagus. It helps, until his escort decides to interrupt, and then he doesn’t need a secondary distraction.

“I know Rey’s been coming to see you.” If Hux’s ears could reverse to the direction of Finn’s voice, they would. “I don’t know why, but it’s gonna stop happening. You hear me?”

Oh, that’s precious. This scared failed soldier is going to try and protect his lightsaber-wielding Jedi friend. She could snap him in two, a visual which pleases him at the moment given this pipsqueak’s ultimatum. 

“I don’t know what the council’s going to decide, but if they send you to prison, she’s not going to be visiting you there.”

Never in a million years would he expect Rey to visit him in prison. Though he hadn’t expected her to show up in the medical room they’d given him, any of the times, despite her having asked permission to return. He agrees with the traitor in so far as he doesn’t know why she’s been visiting him either. She’d gotten the true answer from him about his assistance, that he hadn’t had anything better to do than to help her on board the Antioch, and yet she kept returning. Whatever she got out of her visits from him, he couldn’t guess, especially if she wasn’t lonely, as she claimed, though he still doubted that. 

“Hey, are you listening to me?” asks the tough guy. 

Hux rolls his eyes. “It’s my spine that’s damaged, not my hearing.”

“That’s real funny.” The movement of the chair speeds up, matching an angrier escort’s pace. “I want you to say that you understand that these talks you two have been having are over. Rey’s good. She’s not like you. She wants to see the good in people but people like you don’t have any good. She doesn’t see that you’re evil all the way through.” This is the kind of drivel that organizations like the First Order and the Resistance survive on.  _ They _ are soulless; _ we _ are moral. The Bardottans don’t believe in a differentiation between the self and others. They see themselves as a unit of other and others as an extension of self. Extremes, everywhere Hux looks. 

“We survive,” he says, softly. He’s falling out of the habit of holding back his thoughts. 

“What was that?” asks Finn. Good, the silly boy’s hearing hadn’t picked up his words, only his voice. The chair stops its movement and Hux sighs, already annoyed that he knows where this is going. The traitor stands in front of him and bends down. “I’m serious. It ends.”

It enrages him, not the treatment of himself, but of Rey. There’s no way that this man would ever have a conversation like this if Rey was also a male. Finn sees her as delicate because she’s thin and pretty and female, things Hux may have judged her for initially, but if Finn and Rey are as close as she made it seem, then he should know just how much of her is pure fire. 

“Rey is a warrior. You are a child. And I am no one. What you should be worried about is making sure that she knows she has a place here so that she never, NEVER, joins with Kylo Ren.” Finn is appropriately startled. He’d been thinking of Hux here on board, with Kylo Ren a distant nightmare, one they haven’t faced in nearly a year. But even if Hux was ever a danger to Rey in the past, he sure as hell isn’t now. “That’s your job. Not keeping her from having conversations but keeping her happy, keeping her useful. 

Finn squints at him, going over the words, looking for an angle, a flaw. It takes several moments but Finn finally collects himself, straightening up with a look of hurt pride on his face. “We do.”

“Good,” says Hux. He hopes Finn is right. If he’s not, then Hux hopes that they execute him before he can see what a galaxy run by Kylo Ren and a dark Rey would look like. 

* * *

Hux is surprised by the intimacy of his trial. The room is large for a conference room, but small overall, and he counts only nine people including himself. The council members are directly ahead of the door he passes through. They sit with the backs of their chairs against the wall on the far side of the room with a long pop-up table in front of them, creating both a place to put their datapads and a barrier between them and the rest of the room. There’s a lectern in the center facing the council and an assortment of maybe twenty chairs a few yards behind it near the door. His gaze is focused straight, eyeline somewhere on the wall just beyond Leia, and his chin is high and proud. Still, he knows who the only person among the audience seating is; his periphery vision takes in the white color of her garment, the small but attentive frame, and the silly woolen cap. Rey may be able to feel his fear with her gift, but he won’t let the rest of them see it. 

General Leia speaks to Finn, “You can position him beside the lectern.” Ah yes, just set the cargo anywhere. He keeps his face passive as she refers to him as she would an inanimate object. The hoverchair glides past Rey and he feels her presence like an electric tingle. He wonders if she asked to be there; if so, he appreciates her support.

Finn pushes the chair snugly against the lectern (Hux’s arm brushes the artificial wood finish) and sets the controls to standby mode, the battery again making its sad whine. General Leia dismisses his two escorts and a nonsensical feeling of abandonment runs through him as he’s left alone in front of his executioners. ‘This is how it feels to be on the other side,’ says the quiet voice inside him that has become a persistent nag over the arduous days.

“You can start recording,” General Leia says to a small droid beside her. “This is a tribunal composed of five representatives from the Resistance High Council: Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo, General Leia Organa, Commander Larma D’acy, Caluan Ematt, and Cogtho Zanbre. We meet today to decide what steps are to be taken following the capture of First Order General Armitage Brendol Hux and the subsequent revelation that he has been serving as an informant for the Resistance. As this meeting is intended to be brief and, with its decision potentially classified, the only other parties serving as witnesses will be Resistance member Rey and a transcript from a contact outside of the Resistance who occasionally provides First Order information.”

The announcement of the two witnesses surprises him. So, Rey hadn’t asked to be there but would be recounting the events of the crash. That should serve him well, actually, as she has a misplaced sense of his helpfulness to her during that time. But, there’s also the matter of the third-party contact. That would be Prylar Enzo. How much information would Enzo give? The man was renowned for his confidentiality. Now he sees that the man is just as bad at keeping his mouth shut as scheduling appointments. Hux doesn’t think any of the information he gave Enzo, which admittedly wasn’t much, could be used against him, but he’s angry with himself for having chosen such an unreliable contact. 

“The order will go as follows, General Hux will give us a detailed summary of his involvement with the First Order and with the to-remain-unnamed contact who served as intermediary between himself and the Resistance. The tribunal may ask questions following this summary. The transcript will be read and the tribunal may ask questions. Rey will provide testimony about her interactions with General Hux before and during his capture. The tribunal may ask questions. General Hux will be asked if he wants to provide any further evidence of his participation with the Resistance or has anything else he would like considered. Then the tribunal will convene and a course of action will be decided as to General Hux’s incarceration.

“Are there any questions before we proceed?”

There’s a pause during which Hux thinks of several smartass questions for this sham of a courtroom, but he keeps them to himself. 

“We will proceed then. General Hux, would you care to summarize your role in the First Order first and then go into the details of how it is that you became involved with the Resistance, omitting the contact’s name and location.’

“I am General Armitage Hux, commander of the Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer, Finalizer. I command a crew of approximately 85,000. I oversaw the construction of the weapon on Starkiller Base and gave the order to fire that weapon, destroying five planets in the Hosnian System. My role was to competently execute the orders of my superiors whose intentions were to extend the power and influence of the First Order by increasing its interplanetary and financial holdings and eliminating dissidence.”

It comes so easily to his mouth because he’s said it before. He still feels some pride for his role on the Finalizer. Not just anyone could run a ship of that complement, let alone as efficiently as he has. It’s wiser to downplay that self-satisfaction, to not try and tally up his accomplishments as though this were a performance evaluation. 

Answering the second part of her request is harder and he delays his answer long enough that General Leia finally says, “And how did you end up becoming an informant?” 

He swallows. He doesn’t want to get into this. He can’t answer their questions without it becoming glaringly apparent that he only helped these rebels to stop his co-commander. ‘Truth batters like the wind, spreading the seeds of the Auatra,’ he recalls from his reading. Those damned Bardottans and their imagery. Nothing will bloom from his honesty, only condemnation.

“Sixteen days after the destruction of Starkiller Base, I reached out to our third-party contact. They have a reputation for discretion, and for neutrality, but I had personal information that led me to believe they favored the Resistance over the First Order. I knew even if that wasn’t true, they could still put me in contact with someone from your side.” He pauses again, long enough that he can see Leia thinking about prodding him again. He doesn’t want to mention Ren, but there is no avoiding it, and it’s better to just drop the name early so that it doesn’t seem as though he’s keeping a secret around the dark lord.

“I had information about Kylo Ren’s comings and goings and I offered this to the contact. I was thinking that if the Resistance knew ahead of time where he would be, they could lay a trap for him. Obviously, my reliability would have to be built up over time. For six months, I sent as much information as I could that the Resistance could check or utilize for its own purposes. During that time, I also provided advanced warning of four civilian attacks and sent one recording of the Supreme Leader discussing strategy with Kylo Ren.”

Getting that recording of Snoke was the most dangerous thing he did for the Resistance, and even mentioning it now gives his body a ripple of delayed fear. He’d been convinced this would be the thing that would get him killed, but he knew that many thought the Supreme Leader to be a tall tale, a monster made up by the First Order to keep the stormtroopers in line. He wanted them to know what they were up against, to know that he was real. It was just as important for the Resistance to dethrone Snoke as to subdue Ren.

“Recently, the contact informed me that I would need to be in-person for a hand-off. As we were low on supplies and the contact’s location was near to where we would get these, I took the opportunity to visit the contact along with one of my officers and a stormtrooper. The hand-off was successful but I was shot down before leaving orbit… by the Resistance.” 

He lets the dig slide into his words. The blame for the incident should rightfully fall to Enzo whose poor timing had caused the whole thing, but Hux isn’t going to get the opportunity to hold the Nethic busybody responsible, so he’ll make due with those who fired the weapons.

The council members look at each other, obviously trying to suss out who will ask what first. Holdo takes point, which is appropriate as she is the highest ranking among them. “You said you made contact with the third-party sixteen days after the destruction of the Starkiller Base?”

“Yes…” he catches himself before addressing her as sir, the long sibilant hanging in the air. Her air of authority is palpable enough to elicit the almost slip. 

“Had you been held responsible by your superiors for the destruction of that base and weapon?”

She’s more clever than he prefers to see in his enemies. She’d gone straight to the heart of what she believes the issue is. “Of course. I was the officer in charge of its operation.”

“And what repercussions did you face for that failure?” she asks.

Images like a firefight flash through his mind. Even knowing the question was coming, though he’d hoped it wouldn’t be this direct, he isn’t able to brace himself against them. His heart pounds, his thorn blankets clamoring at the closet door. “I…” Ridiculously, he wishes that Rey wasn’t in the room to hear this. “I was tortured, Vice Admiral.”

There, behind him, like he’d tuned his ears to it, he hears Rey’s gasp. It could be the other female guard but he knows better. The other council members look similarly shocked. “Is that standard procedure for the First Order?”

It hadn’t been, but how to explain that things had gotten worse, so much worse as Snoke and his bulldog had started puppeting the Order? In the beginning, Snoke had been a support, a mysterious shadowy figure with resources that magically appeared, and then, he’d called more shots and more and then he’d taken an interest in the Finalizer, had chosen that flagship for Kylo Ren to inhabit. Violence, rather than ingrained conditioning, became the norm. Executions for disobedience. Choking with invisible hands for unspoken doubts.

“No,” he finally says, unable to give voice to the horrible chain of events.

“Then why for you?” she presses.

Leia interrupts, perhaps feeling that the question is too far off the intent of the tribunal. “And how long did this torture last?”

Holdo had started them down this line of questioning but Leia brings them to the end of it. The vice admiral had wanted him to tell them this, that he hadn’t aided the Resistance because of his guilt over the deaths of a trillion life forms or because he believed in their silly us versus them cause, but because he’d gotten in trouble with his superiors. She wants Hux to have thought, ‘I’ll sell out my superiors because I failed them, because they were mean to me after I did.” 

Let him be damned, then. He’d gust his Auatra seeds wherever they wanted to spread. “Sixteen days,” he says. 

* * *

  
  


** Message from [omitted] to General Leia Organa:

When I allowed you, General, to take the young man into custody, you promised me that he would be given a fair trial. Since that time, I have wrestled greatly with my conscience. The outcome of this internal struggle is this missive. Breaking my confidentiality is not something casually done. However, as I am the one responsible for his capture (through a deficiency of caution and an abundance of poor timing), I must speak on his behalf lest he be held culpable for crimes committed before he allied himself with your organization without consideration as to the good he has done since. You see, the young man you now have in your possession has been providing information to your organization for the last seven months at great personal risk to himself. You are aware of the frequency of the intel that he has provided and, while I can’t speak to it’s value, you found him useful enough to request the transfer of an item to him. 

My people have two beating hearts, a primary which drives us to fulfill our life’s purpose and encourages us to open our lives to those we love, and a secondary which keeps us functioning, keeps us bathing and blinking. When a man ignores the primary heart, choosing only to fill his life with tasks, numb to greater pursuits, we call this “listening to the wrong heartbeat.” 

The young man’s primary heart has everything he needs but he’s unable to hear it. He doesn’t allow his body and mind the quiet he needs to hear it. It is a good heart. I have felt that from the moment I met him. Those things he’s done for which you will try him were done to appease the beat of his secondary heart. Seeking me out to connect with your group may have been the first time he ever followed even one beat of his primary heart. It’s a start. And you find him now at the beginning of that journey. It is my hope that he be allowed to continue it. 

If the decision is reached to keep him alive, rather than leaving him to rot in a cell, I would happily employ him here where there are few to object to his past crimes. Simply bring him to me and I will provide him a quiet bed of his own. If you would be so kind as to please pass on to that young man my heartsfelt apology, I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to give it.

Sincerely, [redacted]

* * *

  
  


‘Sentimental hogwash’ is what Hux tells himself, ‘more useless metaphors for weakness.’ Yet within the restraints, he can feel his hands tremble, and it takes all of his effort to keep his face passive; he might not do a good job at it. He’d met with Enzo in person as soon as he could make a good excuse to do so. It had been less than two weeks after they’d finished disciplining him and after he’d sent the message to Enzo asking for an audience. He hadn’t had to convince the Prylar of his dedication to the Resistance cause and had written it off as a detached opinion of the group, but it had been a trust in him, foolishly placed. The debris of the worlds he had exploded was still drifting, reports still being made of the casualties when Enzo had invited him to demonstrate his usefulness to the Resistance. The poor judgment was staggering, and yet, it hadn’t been really, because Hux did mean what he said. He wasn’t there as a double agent. He’d wanted them to succeed in taking out Ren and Snoke, had, strangely, been counting on the Resistance to restore the First Order as he’d known it, an organization of integrity and bravery, not mind magic and genocide.

“It sounds like you made quite an impression, General Hux,” says General Leia. 

He concurs though he doesn’t understand why. What had this strange man seen in him? Hux had a reputation for not having one heart, let alone two. Why had Enzo thought one of his was worth trusting?

“What would you estimate the total amount of time you and the contact spent talking, through holo and in person?” asks D’acy.

He allows for extra time when they’ll assume he’s counting to try and calm his nerves. He couldn’t bear the humiliation of them hearing his voice tremble with emotion. He clears his throat, finally. “As the contact is rather long-winded, I would guess nine hours.” The number is high, considering most of their communications were coded one-direction messages, but they’d talked for three hours the day of the crash, well, mostly Enzo had talked and he’d taken dinner with the Prylar on their first Nethic meeting. 

“Did you discuss First Order secrets with the contact beyond the messages that we received?” asks Holdo.

“No.” Enzo had asked him questions about his family and his eating and sleeping habits, nothing classified. He’d been rather taken by Hux’s cape, and had said he had every intention to find one like it for himself. As Hux had been reluctant to give more secrets than the ones he had for the Resistance, he’d been pleased with the focus on the mundane, even while mentally chiding the man for his frivolity. 

The council members mumble amongst themselves, apparently concluding more easily this section of questioning than the last which had gone on for what had felt like more than an hour. “With that concluded, we will move on to Rey. Rey,” calls General Leia fondly. “Are you ready?”

He’s still shaken from Enzo’s letter and to bide himself a small amount of time, he asks for water. He drinks from the glass that Finn hands him as Rey walks into his side vision, stepping directly in front of the lectern. He doesn’t dare look at her, but passes back the glass and braces himself despite his optimism that this will benefit his case. He doesn't want to hear more kind words that he didn’t earn. 

* * *

  
  


She’s less than a meter away from Hux but he won’t look at her. She wonders if he thinks she’s going to call for his execution or if he’s just embarrassed by their association. His beard has merged with his sideburns, but they’re much thicker and uniform. The tops of his ears are pink, maybe from her staring down at them. He looks so slight in the chair, though his voice had carried so well in the room. His words so often have weight because he chooses them so carefully. He’d been minimal in his answers, but even those few words had been shocking. They’d tortured him for the destruction of Starkiller and he hadn’t gone into details, had sounded so matter-of-fact about it. Her mental torture at the hands of Kylo Ren had lasted minutes and been relatively easy. It certainly hadn’t lasted sixteen days and it had been all mental, which was enough, but how would she have held up to physical and mental torture? Would she be as composed as he is in his hoverchair? She thinks she finally is beginning to understand why he’d felt such resignation about his impending death. He had already been through so much. 

“Thank you, Rey. Could you just briefly outline the circumstances of General Hux’s capture?”

Rey isn’t sure this is necessary, what she’s meant to let them know that they don’t already. With a few stutters and pauses, she recalls those events for them. Considering her mental state at the time, she remembers those on the ship with a crystal clarity. She starts with her tardiness for rendezvous and then her abduction by his two subordinates. She tells them about his displeasure with her addition to the ship, which makes more sense now, knowing that he’d been working for their side. She can see the humor now, though it’s a dark joke, to her search for the non-existent forward docking hatch. He might have laughed at her foolishness if he hadn’t been dying. She recalls for them how he’d warned her not to fall asleep. He hears her calling to him, saying “Scavenger” over and over again, but maybe he’d only said it once, the frantic angry yells. He was allowed to give up but she wasn’t; she omits this observation from her retelling. She’s trying not to insert any of her speculations, lest she inadvertently provide them more motivation to execute him. 

“And have you had any conversations with General Hux since that time regarding his cooperation with the Resistance?” asks Leia. It makes Rey feel sold out. She won’t lie, but those had been private discussions, ones by two hurting and scared people. 

“I...yes, there were, after you announced that he was a spy. I was angry he hadn’t told me.”

Rey doesn’t like the looks that the council exchanges. “And why would he make you a confidant?” asks D’acy.

She looks down at Hux. He’s still facing forward and all she can see of his face is his nose. “He asked me a similar question. I… I don’t know why I thought he should tell me. We’d talked about my troubles and he hadn’t…” It’s getting too personal, to places she didn’t want to share with these people. “I was just angry. I’m angry a lot after my head injury.”

Let Poe call it using the head injury card, but she doesn’t like the way they’re eyeing her distrustfully, all but Leia, of course, who looks pitying. That’s worse. 

“Did he happen to tell what his motivations were for providing the Resistance with information?”

She hears his voice in her head from the previous day, ‘He wants to make you his apprentice’ and how it had felt when she’d slipped into his head, the regret of the deaths, and the sorrow of loss…

...something changes…

One second she’s empathizing with Hux, remembering how his mind had felt, and the next, vision and hearing and all the other senses but one abandon her. The last thing she hears is herself gasp, a sharp intake, before she’s plunged into a reality that isn’t hers.

* * *

  
  
Rey stands proudly on the command deck of The Finalizer, hands locked behind her back. She’s worked so hard for this. The ship is hers. The stars are hers. She feels like she could reach out with one gloved hand and rein it all in, a galaxy revolving in her palm.

Hux’s mouth has turned to sand by the time he gets back to the AT-AT, sun-scorched limbs moving stiffly like a bipedal droid. He hadn’t prepared properly, hadn’t planned on being out that long. He empties the canteen, a paltry amount of water, but enough to keep him alive. Afterwards, he lies in the machine’s shade and gasps at the pains in his side, feeling the enormity of his own mortality. He knows no one would find his body for days, maybe weeks.

She’s on her hands and knees reaching for the cup when Brendol kicks her in the stomach, a proper punishment for spilling the tea in this household. She’s glad she hasn’t eaten yet; she won’t vomit this time. He looks down at her, says something awful, and she prepares for another kick. It doesn’t come this time. She’ll try harder in the future to avoid a next time. She must strive for perfection in all things, just like him.

Unkar Plutt offers him 60 ration portions for BB8, dumping them all out in front of him, more food than he’s ever seen in his life, and he wants to take the deal. But BB8 is down by his knees, looking up at him with trust and he’s just another lost soul like him, waiting on those to whom he belongs to find him and take him home.

She’s absent-mindedly running a hand over the curve of the Twi’ilek’s hip. Her session is almost up, but she’s finally done it. She will no longer have to lie or pretend she knows what people are talking about when sex comes up. It didn’t seem worth the hype.

He’s scream-crying and his arm is being wrenched but Mommy and Daddy are on that ship and he’s being left behind and he doesn’t know why. They have to come back for him, they must. 

She doesn’t remember how she got here, on her knees in a supply closet. She remembers the seconds leading up to the speech and a bright red light and then nothing until now, coming into consciousness mid-retch. What has she done? Her stomach spasms and the last of the contents of her belly come up. What has she done? ‘You’ve done what you had to do!’ yells her brain. ‘Pull it together.’ It sounds like Brendol. She listens like she always has and he’s right like always. There is so much left to do. She tucks the screaming horror away, pushes it and the bile down.

He’s scared of the lightsaber and what it represents: a destiny he doesn’t want. He just wants to find his parents and to leave the immensity of these strangers’ expectations behind. Why does Maz even have it? The visions… everything in him quakes at the idea that they may come true, the rain and the evil warriors. He has to get out.

She’s reading Lotain and drinking a Corellian wine in her quarters when she receives the news of Brendol’s death. She finishes the glass and though the word ‘orphan’ resounds like thunder in her skull, she forces a smile. She intended to meet his death with a smile and she would, dammit. He certainly doesn’t deserve her grief.

Kylo Ren, mask off, probes into his mind, into his fears. He can’t move in the chair and he struggles against the restraints on his body and the black fingers of the monster’s mind. Ren can see his memories. He flips through them like a photo album and with each page, Hux fights to keep the pages together. The fingers that rifle through the thought-pages are inky with dark blood.

Everything hurts when she’s thrown into a bulkhead, tossed like a limp ragdoll at the mercy of Kylo Ren’s mood. It’s nothing to him, just another day. Her crew sees, which is the worst part, and she tries to maintain a stiff dignity but the sharp pang up her leg makes her falter. She sees pity in Mitaka’s eyes as she wobbles to her place on the command deck.

Kylo Ren chases him through the white snow, eyes reflecting the angry red light of his saber. How can Hux possibly defend himself against the pure rage of twisted Force darkness? One lone desert urchin against this well-trained killing machine. He takes up the lightsaber, against his will, and he steels himself as best he can with a bravery he doesn’t yet feel. 

Snoke’s voice is in her head taunting her, and it doesn’t matter that he’s halfway across the galaxy probably, because he’s so powerful there’s nowhere to hide from him. “When I am finished punishing Kylo Ren, I am turning him on you,” he threatens and she knows he’ll make good on it and she quivers inside, can’t tell whether it’s a tear that rolls down her cheek or blood. She’s shed so much of both since this started.

* * *

  
  


Finn’s behind Rey and Hux, so he doesn’t see what makes the council rise to their feet. Leia calls Rey’s name and he hears “what’s wrong with them?” from one of the other members, and he’s already moving towards her, sees the stiffness in her shoulders before he can look at her blank tranced expression. He speaks her name, touches her arm, but her eyes are white and unblinking. Hux, when Finn passes a glance to him, is in the same state, eyes rolled up to show only white and the bundle of nerves keeping them attached. 

The door to the conference room slides open and Finn looks to see Kaydel sprinting out, reflexes good enough to seek out a doctor rather than stand around goggling like the rest of them. 

“Rey, come on,” he says, snapping his fingers in front of her eyes. “What’s going on?” he yells to Leia, though she’s not far from him now. 

She shakes her head, has no idea. She waves a hand in front of Hux. “This isn’t good,” she says. 

A long horrible minute of terror passes before the stakes increase as Rey’s body drops like a sack of flour. He manages to catch her upper body at the last second, saving her head from yet another collision, and the seizures come. Her movements are terrifyingly sharp and he tries to rein in her flailing arms. “Rey!” he yells in fear. “What’s happening?”

He hears Hux’s voice not far away. “It’s the amplifier! Get rid of the amplifier! Finn, get rid of the amplifier!” He has no time to react to the oddness of his former commander calling him by a real name rather than his designation. He searches her, finds the amplifier, and he throws it as hard as he can away from Rey. Her convulsions stop at once. It’s a minor relief, because she’s not responding to his voice or his touches. He puts a hand on her chest, could cry to see it rise and fall beneath his fingers. 

He pulls her into his arms, cradles her close. “Hang in there. Doctor’s on the way.” He looks searchingly at the others, hoping someone has an idea. Hux is leaning forward from his hoverchair, watching with round terrified eyes. Shit, Finn thinks. It hadn’t occurred to him that the inexplicable fondness Rey feels for Hux could go both ways, but the panicked concern that Finn feels he can see reflected back in the eyes of the First Order monster. 

An atmosphere change occurs when the doctor arrives, and Finn definitely feels more comfortable having someone who knows what they're doing on the scene. After quick examinations of both Rey and Hux, he orders Finn to get her to the medbay where he has more equipment at his disposal. He carries her out himself, leaving behind a very worried room of people. She weighs close to nothing but he can tell by the looseness of her body that she’s still very dead to the world. After laying her on the medbay bed, he waits in a corner of the room as the doctor does his job. 

“Well, physically she is doing fine, brain waves are good, heart. I have her on anti-seizure medication, just to be on the safe side. We’re going to have to see how she’s doing when she wakes.” Finn remembers that from last time. He’d been so afraid she would be only half of her old self following the brain surgery. While the loss of her Force powers had been devastating to her, he’d been so relieved that it was all she’d lost. It could have been much worse. 

Doctor Winchina leaves to check in on Hux and since there’s not much more that he can do until she’s awake. Feeling bold, Finn plucks her out of the bed and sits with her on a chair he’d brought in while waiting by her bedside all those days ago. He pays extra attention to not disturb the doodads stuck on her scarred head. 

Rey revives not more than an hour later. She looks up at Finn and realizing that it’s his arms she’s scooped up in, smiles. He melts accordingly. “Hey, welcome back,” he whispers. 

She looks around them, sees that they’re back in a medbay room and groans. “Oh, I really don’t want to be back here,” she moans.

“Yeah, I didn’t want you back here either, but Dr. Winchina’s got your brain wired up to see what’s going on in there.” He tugs very gently on one of the wires in demonstration. There’s six around her head. She scrunches up her forehead as does. “I’m gonna let him know you’re awake, okay?”

She looks down at herself, sees that she’s still wearing her clothes and not the gown they’d stuck her in for her surgery. Relief crosses her face, followed instantly by worry. “Hux. Is he okay?”

He can feel the smile erase itself from his face like a computer screen going blank. Finn hates how much of the last couple of weeks have involved that oxygen-wasting slimeball. 

“Yeah,  _ he’s _ fine. You were the one who had a goddamn seizure.”

Her eyes widen. “What happened?”

That’s more what he expected her first question to be, not how Hux was. “The amplifier must have fritzed. Hux was yelling at us to get it off you. Once we did, you stopped convulsing.” He still doesn’t know how Hux knew what it was that was causing the seizure, but it’s probably another Force thing that he can’t understand.

“You’re telling me it’s not on me?” she asks, feeling around in her empty pocket.

“Nope, it’s back in the conference room, unless someone’s grabbed it.” He doesn’t mention to her that if someone had picked it up, it would probably be with a broom. He’d really thrown that damn thing with all his fear.

A wide gorgeous smile sweeps over her face. “Then, it’s back. I can feel the Force.” Tears sparkle in her eyes. “I can feel you again without it!”

“Oh, wow!” he says and he hugs her tightly. “That’s great, Rey!” It occurs to him what this means. “So, it wasn’t the amplifier that fritzed!”

“No, it was my brain that fritzed!” They share a laugh. She continues. “The device kept amplifying my Force abilities even after they’d returned. I was inside of Hux’s head, inside his memory. I could see everything and he could see everything about me.”

A lead weight drops in Finn’s stomach. He can’t imagine what it would be like to be inside the head of a mass murderer. “You okay? That must have been pretty bad.”

She shakes her head. “No, it was… well, it was intense, but I had wanted to better understand him and now I do.”

“Poe told me not to talk to you about him. We found out you were visiting him.” He’s speaking cautiously, doesn’t want to set off her anger, especially not now when she’s just been having fits on the floor of the tribunal, but it seems like now is as good a time as he’s going to get to bring up how worried he is. “Rey, I know how you are. You always want to see the good in people. Some people don’t have bests. Some people are lost causes.”

With deep conviction and finality, she says, voice low, “I don’t believe in lost causes.” There had been a time once when she could have written Finn off. He’d pretended to be Resistance just to keep that look of awe in her eyes, just to impress her, and when he’d confessed that he was just a stormtrooper on the run, she could have discounted him without any qualms. He’d lied since they met and they didn’t have the history together that demonstrated that he could be a good friend anyway. She’d blindly stood by his side again and again and her faith in him, he hoped, had paid off. He likes to think that he showed her that he’s a man of character.

Now she’s doing that with Hux, but there’s a whopping difference between a liar and someone who commits genocide. It’s not exactly a nuanced difference either.

“Just be careful, please. I know you’re a…” He remembers Hux’s word, ‘warrior’ for her. It had been a good reminder. It’s so easy to forget because she  _ looks _ so fragile, especially now with no hair and curled up in his arms, but Rey’s really not. “Badass…” he finishes. “But, we’re each other’s family, you and me, and we’ve got to look out for each other. Try not to make it harder for me?”

Rey nods. “I’ll try. He is changing, though. I’ve seen it. There’s something opening in him.”

Finn thinks about the frantic fear in Hux’s eyes as Rey lay motionless on the ground. He can’t argue with her because the superior officer he’d had would never have given a spit to save a life. Maybe Hux, like all the rest of them, had a soft spot for this desert rat who came from nothing. She did have a certain way of getting under the skin. 

“Thank you for watching over me,” she says to Finn, snapping him out of his thoughts. 

“Always,” he says, noticing for the thousandth time how good it feels when she smiles at him like that. 

* * *

Following Doctor Winchina’s favorable health update on Rey, General Leia consults with the other council members about continuing without finishing Rey’s testimony. The decision to proceed is unanimous, and she sends for General Hux. He appears wearier than he had earlier, chin less high and eyes more haunted. She walks to him, much to Kaydel’s agitation, since she’s serving as a bodyguard for the moment, and asks him in a quiet voice if he’s feeling up for speaking. They had all been through quite an ordeal and while the doctor had seemed unconcerned with Hux’s health following the incident, she doesn’t want to subject the man to too much in one day. 

“I am quite able to speak,” he says, though the darkened skin under his eyes says otherwise. “Thank you for your concern.” It sounds insincere, but Leia decides to take it at face value, returning to her spot along the far wall.

“The council feels that the partial testimony given today by Rey was sufficient and that they have no pressing questions that would require delaying proceedings for her presence.” She would have had questions, but they weren’t really necessary ones. They were motherly ones, a role which she’s botched well enough that she should know better than to try again with anyone else, least of all a grown woman who shares no blood ties with her. She’s listened to the audio recordings of the conversations between the former First Order general and her apprentice and while she’s troubled by the quick bond for Rey’s sake, she’s more troubled by the seeming effect that her young protege has on the leader of Starkiller Base.

Leia meant what she’d told Prylar Enzo; she has every intention of giving Hux a fair trial. That had been before she’d known about his secret identity as a Resistance operative. Before that, it had been simply a matter of the death penalty or life imprisonment. Now she has to consider that this man who participated in such unprecedented violence could be an ally. The council has on their datapads the information he’d given them and it hadn’t been minimal. His intel saved many lives, not as many as he’d taken, but not a small number either. They’d been able to evacuate locations because of him. She’d been able to hear, for the first time in years, the voice of her son though filtered through that awful mask and, to her horror, the voice of the creature who had stolen her son away. 

It’s as Holdo already told her: Hux has not done enough to redeem himself. The question that curls like a smoke in her mind is: can he? With Rey’s continued influence, would he open more? It’s dangerous to rely on something as fleeting as infatuation, but hadn’t that been how so many of the events in her life began? Luke, dazzled by her own holo-message, had set off with Obi-Wan to rescue her from Darth Vader. How differently everything would have gone if he hadn’t followed that sparkle in his heart, a tingle in the Force that told him even then that she was someone very important. 

She continues speaking for the recording and for Hux who needs to know what happens next. “We will continue on to the last portion of this inquiry. We ask that General Armitage Hux offer anything else for consideration, any evidence or pleas, and then we shall deliberate. General Hux, is there anything else you would like to say for yourself?”

He isn’t the impressive figure that he’d cut during his oration preceding the Hosnian Cataclysm. He’s upright in the ratty old chair they’d found for him, but the fire is gone from him. His face is covered in curly red hairs but he still looks so young, young like her Ben. He seems so different even from this morning, so much more worn down. When he speaks, his voice isn’t resounding, but he’s trying.

“Thank you for taking the time to consider my fate. In the First Order, this would have been efficiently but heartlessly dealt with by a quick blaster shot to the head. In a way, I would have preferred that, but then, I wouldn’t have had time to think about why I deserved that shot.

“I would like to ask this tribunal to decide to execute me.”

If a pin dropped in the room, they would have all turned to stare at it. As it is, they just look with wide eyes at the man sitting beside the lectern. It is the last thing she expected to hear, and she’s immediately on guard for a ploy. Is he feigning this guilt, this death wish, or is it an attempt to earn sympathy?

“I have no more information to offer you, no more missions I could carry out for you. I can’t return to the First Order as a spy or as myself. I no longer have any usefulness to anyone. I can’t even walk…” his voice breaks a little and he clears his throat. “To live as I am now, with the awareness of what I’ve done, would be a greater misery than a quick death. You’ve already been more than generous to me, but if you would grant me one more favor, I would prefer to die.”

A long silence fills the air. He’s obviously finished, but Leia doesn’t have the motivation to speak. Instead, Amilyn takes over. 

“Is there anything else?” she asks.

“No, sir,” Hux says. 

“In that case, this tribunal will convene. It has already been decided that given the late hour, the deliberation process will proceed tomorrow.” 

Leia is very glad they would have a night to sleep on their decision, not that she expects to get a wink. It’s one thing to end a life in a moment of action, but to do so to an unarmed injured man who asks so politely for it… Now she understands why his eyes look so haunted. 

“We will send for you when we’ve made our decision,” says Amilyn.

Betton pushes Hux out of the room after initiating its noisy mechanisms with Kaydel, blaster in hand, following behind. Amilyn looks at her. They’ve known each other a very long time and she’s surprised to see the hesitation in her friend’s eyes. Good to know that Leia isn’t the only conflicted member. “Would you care to take some tea with me tonight?” Leia asks. She’ll make sure that the drinks she offers have tea as at least an ingredient to not make herself a liar, but she suspects they will burn going down quite a bit more than the average cup of Deychin.

* * *

  
  


Rey doesn’t make small talk with Betton, though he tries. She just shrugs at his question about her health and walks past him. Hux is lying on his back, not sitting up with pillows behind him as his usual. His eyes are open and he’s staring up at the ceiling. As she approaches, his eyes flick to her, before returning upwards. He recites:

“I dream of eyes that see inward

With clarity of spring water

To never again know the thirst

For compassionate company.”

He’s been expecting her; his body is as far over as it can go, leaving her ample space to sit. She removes her boots and climbs onto the bed, stretching herself out beside him on the small mattress. He lifts his arm reflexively, the metal of his restraints clinking but allowing the movement, and she curls into the nook of his arm and chest. Without asking, he removes her cap, setting it aside. 

They breathe. He’s warmer than she’d expected him to be. When he tilts his chin to her head, the beard bristles tickle. She’s only lain like this with Finn before and she knows Hux never has with anyone. It’s different from that, and not just because of the melancholy of the moment. When she cuddles with Finn, it feels solid and reliable. This feels stolen, fleeting, like something she needs to appreciate now or never. 

She thinks of the poem he’d been reciting. In his memories, she’d thought like him, felt like him, and there had been compassion for the things he’d endured. She knows it’s the same way for him. Does it become self-pity then or is there some way to grant yourself compassion without becoming mired down with self-recriminations? That shared experience has changed him further, more dramatically than a thousand of their visits could have. He feels different, his Force aura seems burdened. He’s finally accepting things like guilt and sorrow. His sins of the past and the bleakness of his future are dragging him down.

“You’ve given up,” she whispers.

“I’ve nothing left to fight with.” His breath is warm on the bare skin of her scalp. “I broke my place in the First Order. Your friends broke my ship and body. Ren and Snoke broke my mind. And you broke my walls. There is nothing left to me. I’m a husk. I am as utterly destroyed as Ilum.”

“Ilum is a star now. They call it Solo. It’s not gone. It became light.”

Hux laughs. “Optimist.” His hand strokes her elbow, softly and hesitantly. “Neither of us had examples of how to be good people. How did you learn to care where I failed?”

Empathy came easy to her, though she isn’t sure why. It was always so obvious to her that others had their own problems and she never wanted to add to them. “I don’t know,” she says. “But you’re not a husk.” She thinks of the contact’s letter to Hux, the message about his potential. She smiles. “Remember, you’re the man with two hearts.”

He groans, as she’d suspected he would, knowing his professed aversion to flowery prose. “In that case, I shall give one to you for safekeeping; you’ll treat it better than I do anyway.” She slides her hand across his chest and rests it on the shoulder not beneath her head. He feels so real; too many years of wishing she could just be held skewing her expectations. His nose nudges her head. “But then, I’m not sure you haven’t already taken one.”

His admission creates a warm ball in her belly and she burrows her face in closer, partially to hide her red cheeks, though the lighting is low in the room he can’t see much of her face from that angle anyway. She hears his heartbeat, steady and reassuring. She counts it, absent-mindedly, and she basks in the comfort of something so simple.

A long time passes. Rey’s mind wanders to the point where she realizes that she hadn’t been thinking of anything at all. It was like sleep, but less fraught with nightmares She looks up at Hux. His eyes are shut. In a tiny whisper she asks, “Are you awake?”

“Yes.” 

“Would you read to me again?”

He smiles, eyes still closed. “I can do that. You’ll need to fetch the datapad. It’s on your side.”

When she sits up, her neck complains about being in one position for so long and the inside of her ear is warm from where it laid on his chest. She tilts it back, causing it to make a satisfying crack. “Is your arm asleep?”

“Very,” he answers. 

“I’ll switch sides. I need to…” she pauses, embarrassed. “I need to use the lavatory first.”

He blinks, the low light too bright compared to the curtains of his eyelids. “I need to as well, though my method these days isn’t as visitor-friendly.” 

Rey gets to her feet and is surprised to find that she’d forgotten all about Betton on the other side of the open doorway. She sees just his elbow. It’s not her favorite thing, to have her new acquaintance privy to a very private moment, but she’s never fashioned her life around what others think of her and she has no intention of starting now. “I’ll take extra time then,” she assures Hux.

She’s so worried about walking back out on him using one of the hoses around his bed, that she stays long enough in the lavatory to have assembled a fully functional droid. When she comes out, he’s moved himself to the other side of the bed, allowing his other arm to take the weight of her head. She wonders how hard it is to do that without being able to move his legs at all. She remembers to snatch up the datapad only at the last second before finding the parallel spot on his chest. From here, she’ll have a view of the doorway, which embarrasses her; she doesn’t want the reminder.

She passes it to him, and the screen lights up part of the room.

“And what will I be reading to you? Philosophy? Poetry? Technical manuals?” he teases.

“Something happy,” she says.

“Hm, that’s not often a descriptor applied to the classics, but I’ll see what I can do.”

Hux finds something more than suitable and she listens to the rumble of the words in his chest and drifts off into a light but appreciative sleep.

* * *

“Please,” says Hux quickly, one hand in the air in a ‘stop’ gesture. “Don’t put your feet on the bed.”

Marshall, this time clad in a psychedelic caftan, its colors swirling in patterns of feathery spirals and blobs, and his head topped with a tiny three-tiered hat like he’s put a child-sized wedding cake up there, gives him a wide grin. “Ah, today he speaks up about it! You must be in a good mood.” 

Why the therapist should assume that just because he’s pleading with the man not to put his extremities where everything should be medically sterile, Hux cannot fathom, but he’s not wrong. Everything feels different this morning; he feels different this morning, cleansed after a sleepless night of beauty and hopelessness.

“I take it the trial went well?” Before Hux can answer, he follows up with, “Is it okay if I sit on the stool if I keep my feet down?” He tosses Hux a wink and sits. 

Hux rolls his eyes. He knows what to expect of his unusual company this time, so he’s better able to handle any immediate repulsion of Marshall’s breezy personality. He’s thankful that he’s shown up when he said he would, and the timing couldn’t be better, even if the person could. “Have you seen PTSD change anyone for the better, ever?” he asks.

“I don’t know if I like the term better in this case.” 

“Semantics to avoid saying no?” 

Marshall cackles. “Hey, spitfire, I don’t know what got into you today, but I like it. No, I’m not being evasive. Traumatic events can change people and then defusing their own coping mechanisms changes people.”

Hux considers this. “So, different, not necessarily better.”

“Bingo.” He puts a finger up to his now spiral earrings, and they jingle a little, like tiny musical instruments. Obnoxious down to his earlobes. “Are you hoping to change for the better?”

“I may already have.” Last night belonged to someone else. His memories that had resurfaced, flooding into Rey during her power-surge, didn’t immediately rest back in place after, nor her shared memories that drowned him in her fears and loneliness. All those restless recollections and stirred up emotions floated made it hard to breathe, crushed his chest under their heft. He’d never let himself feel that guilt. He’d pawned off the responsibility, told himself that it wasn’t him that wanted those people dead, but Snoke. It was his superior’s fault. There had been a voice in his head, quieter than that of Brendol’s, when he came to his senses in that random utility closet following the implementation of their terrible weapon. It had said, “no more.” That was when he’d decided to sabotage the darkside users, not after torture. He’d told himself to get through saving what he could of his crew, of the fragments that the project had become, and then, when things were calmer… He’d told that voice to wait and it had. Luckily he hadn’t fleshed anything out or Ren would have found it when scraping with sharp fingernails into psyche while his flesh was excoriated. It had just been a lone quiet promise. “No more,” he’d agreed with the voice.

And then to have Rey’s struggles there too and they were so different from his. Where his pain came from his lack of freedom, hers came from an overabundance. She had no tethers, no importance. The sense of abandonment had been devastating, left to polish metal scraps in the galaxy’s junkyard, every day passing the same way. It was all secondary heart things, just the survival, and then, when she’d found the calling of her primary, the summons from her destiny, she’d wanted to run from it because she didn’t feel worthy. 

“I wanted to die. That’s not quite right. I didn’t want to keep living,” he tells Marshall. “I thought paying for what I’d done by offering my death was the best I could do for them, but what if she’s right? What if Enzo’s right?” What if the worst thing anyone had ever done, the destruction of five whole planets in one instant, hadn’t been the only legacy he could leave behind? He absolutely knows he can’t become a star like Ilum, but what if, now that he’s free of the First Order and the trappings of command (no time to consider an action’s morality when you have 85,000 men and women waiting for their orders), he can do something constructive?

In the quiet of the long night, Hux had apologized for his delay in answering that little voice. “No more” had taken a while, but he’s there now. And he’s wondering if he can’t make it apply to more people than just himself. It might be too late, with his jury already deliberating on his request. 

“What if I can create instead of destroy?” Hux asks. “What if I can be more like her?”

“What is she like?” asks Marshall, latching on to a softness in his tone, though, of course, the therapist has no idea who this mysterious she even is. 

How would he even begin to describe Rey?

As if hearing her cue from inside his head, Rey appears in the doorway, a small round droid whirring beside her. She has a thick paper-bound book in her hand and a wild-eyed half-crazy expression on her lovely face. The guard leans comically behind her, unsure if he should stop her or not. She smiles at Hux, and for once, he smiles without reservation back. 

She notices the absurd therapist with his chaotically colored baggy ensemble, ridiculous hat, and jangly musical earrings. “Nice to meet you, Marshall,” she says. Then, to Hux: “I’ve got a plan.”

“And a book,” he points out.

She displays the book to him. It appears to be a rather weighty human anatomy book. Heavy reading, though he fails to catch her thinking. “Technical manual.” She explains, smiling too large and a bit too devious. “To teach me how to put the parts back together.”

* * *

  
  


Rey’s request to attend the verdict announcement is granted, though with some hesitation on Leia’s part, though it’s not as necessary that she be there physically since she’s already attending, piggybacking on Hux’s thoughts as he is pushed into the conference room. He nods to her, no more stiff resignation on his face, but nervousness and excitement. It’s Kaydel maneuvering him to his place in the center of the room this time and she whispers her name in Hux’s head, since she’s not sure they’ve met.  _ The one who taught Finn to knit? _ he asks. He’s better at forming direct thoughts than any other non-Force adept she’s met; she thinks it stems from how hard he’d focused control over his thoughts in life, a skill surely honed in the presence of Snoke and Ren who would have jumped at the opportunity to use any errant ideas against him. She allows him to feel her pride that he’s making efforts to remember her friends.  _ Yes. She’s a junior controller. _

Finn tilts his head at her, as he follows behind Kaydel, mostly symbolic blaster in hand. Rey smiles slightly at him. He squints in response, untrusting her good mood, but focuses again on his job. She thinks he must have been a dedicated stormtrooper before they’d asked him to commit the atrocities which led him to defect. Despite his initial resistance, he throws himself into his role in the Resistance with ardor. 

Kaydel powers down the hoverchair and steps back a meter or so to join Finn. 

“You may start recording,” General Leia says to a droid. Rey doesn’t recognize it, thinks it may be one of the droids not programmed to speak, the ones who are little more than mobile computers. She prefers the ones with personalities. If she ever gets around to designing her own, which she has considered doing many times, it will have as close to sentience as she can program. 

“We meet today…”

Seconds before he speaks, she feels Hux’s apprehension. Given the offended look that Leia gives him when he does, she understands why. “General, I would like to speak before the verdict is given.”

Rey receives a glare of her own from Finn, though it’s surreptitiously given, and it’s kind of funny that he knows she’s somewhat to blame for the interruption. 

“We gave you the opportunity to speak on your own behalf yesterday,” says Leia.

Now is his moment. His hands are still bound, but his legs are free, and Hux rises from the hoverchair. Sounds of surprised dismay come from the members of the council and from Kaydel. Even knowing it was coming, it takes Rey’s breath away to see him stand, to know that she’s the reason that he’s able to do so.

“My situation has changed since then,” Hux says blandly. 

“So I see,” says Leia with a frown. She looks at Rey; she knows, somehow, that it was Rey’s connection to the Force that fixed him. In her head, Rey hears Leia’s voice,  _ What have you done? _

Rey’s confidence in her actions wavers. She’s never faced her master’s disapproval before. Of all the souls she’s encountered in her life, Leia is the closest she’s ever had to a mother figure, and definitely the one person she wants most to impress. 

_ She’s angry at me, _ she tells Hux. It’s more complex than that, but Rey wants to keep her messages brief to not be a distraction.

Leia speaks room, and to the droid, in a professional monotone. “This tribunal is composed of five representatives from the Resistance High Council: Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo, General Leia Organa, Commander Larma D’acy, Caluan Ematt, and Cogtho Zanbre. We will be deciding on a course of action for General Hux, formerly of the First Order, who has been captured and revealed to be an informant for the Resistance. This is the second day of the tribunal, following a medical emergency which delayed the process. General Hux has asked to once again address the tribunal before the already determined verdict is given. Given a change in his own medical status and a morbid curiosity on my part, we will let him speak.” 

Rey breathes a sigh of relief. If they hear him out, maybe they’ll give him a chance.

“Yesterday, I asked to be executed.” 

[It’s probably not necessary for Hux to be on his stomach, but her hand is in close to direct contact with the damaged bones this way, no obstructing organs. She’s already studied the picture and she compares the images in the text with what she sees when she closes her eyes: damaged nerves that lead nowhere and surgically knitted together bones in clumsy repair.]

“I didn’t want to accept my role in the destruction of the Hosnian System and I didn’t want to change.”

[ _ Some of the wires are disconnected, _ she notes.  _ Please don’t refer to my body as though it was a machine, he _ replies. She could call it something different but that’s essentially what these nerves are. She sees their frayed ends, some completely fried like they’d had a power surge. It’s not really dissimilar from how the compressor looked after she bypassed it on the Millenium Falcon.]

“But I had already changed. My indoctrination made my actions possible but it could not remove my humanity.”

[She ignores the nerves that are completely dead, looks instead to the damaged ones. She seeks out the gaps in the wires and draws deeply upon the Force, asking it for balance and restoration. Heat emanates from her hands and she feels the nerves react. In her mind, they glow.]

“I would like to retract my request for execution. Instead, I would like to request that I be allowed to continue aiding the Resistance.”

[She hears Hux’s mental cry of pain and she freezes.  _ It’s working. Keep going, _ he tells her. It’s the sensations of pain coming back first. She should have thought about that. She looks at the bones instead, sees where they’re pieced together like a model spaceship and she encourages the crevices to grow smaller.]

“I lack confidence in your cause, and with my history of association with the First Order, I’d think my misgivings regarding military organizations would be understandable.” 

[There’s so much damage and it’s so much work, looking at each individual spot, making sure she’s not fusing things that shouldn’t go together, and continually re-finding dead wires that she can do nothing about. She’s growing tired and he’s reaching a threshold for pain.]

“But I have complete faith in Rey. She believes in you and as long as the Resistance remains true to her values, to my values, I will serve it with loyalty.”

[ _ Keep going _ he says.  _ I can take it.  _ She’s afraid she won’t be able to much longer.  _ If I faint, it’s up to you to turn off the amplifier, _ she warns. She doesn’t want to have seizures again.]

“You were right that seven months of helping your cause doesn’t undo what I’ve done, but it’s a good start to seeing that the First Order doesn’t get the chance to do it again.”

[Hux cries out, though he’s trying not to, and they both hope it doesn’t attract attention.  _ Shhh, _ she soothes.  _ I’m almost done. _ She is too, strangely. She’s finding less of gapped wires and his leg bone looks as though it was never damaged at all.  _ It burns, _ he thinks.  _ That’s my hand, _ she says. The Force is pumping through her so much that it’s scalding them both.]

“I ask the tribunal to let me live for the first time.”

[When she pulls away, she’s still conscious but her vision has spots of nothing. Hux turns off the amplifier. They pant in saggy-bodied, damp skin exhaustion. “Did it work?” she asks him. “I just wiggled my toes,” he answers. She laughs giddily.]

Hux sits back down in the hoverchair, ending his speech. Rey wants to go to him but it isn’t appropriate. She knows how hard it was for him to be open about his feelings like that. Nothing about the last two weeks has been easy for either of them.

She won’t regret healing him, regardless of what they decide, even if they execute him an hour from now. She’d made him walk and she’s proud of herself and he’d accepted the help and she’s proud of him for it. 

The room isn’t a large enough one for the council to speak in private, but they give each other looks and limited mumbles come from their mouths. When Leia speaks, it’s in a chiding voice. “I am not a fan of how you chose to conduct yourself today,” she says. “Much deliberation has been given to the verdict of this tribunal and we will not be convening to consider changing the decision we have already reached.”

Rey’s heart sinks.  _ We gave it our best _ , she hears immediately. His words are a poor attempt at consolation when she can feel how crestfallen he is. 

Leia sighs. “So, it’s a good thing that we had already decided to deny your request for execution.”

They’re going to let him live! She could jump or squeal or any number of silly reactions. Instead, she waits to hear more.

“It was felt that enough blood has already been shed and to execute you for your crimes in the First Order would be an act of revenge and not justice,” she says, looking directly at Rey as she says the last part. Rey’s heart feels too full and if she has to wipe at the corner of her eye, well, it wouldn’t be the silliest reason to do so. “Some discussion will need to be had about the nature of your continued involvement with the Resistance. If you’re being honest about helping out, well, there are many ways you can do that even with limited freedoms. And there will be a limit to your freedoms.”

“Thank you, General Leia,” he says. 

“It is the judgment of this tribunal that Armitage Hux will not receive the death penalty for his actions in service to the First Order. You may stop recording… And Rey, we need to have a talk.”


	6. Epilogue

Four Months Later

“I can’t tell if he’s bluffing,” says Finn. He’s got his cards against his chest and one of his eyes narrowed in a distrustful squint.

“That’s because Hux doesn’t have human emotions. He’s like a redheaded droid,” says Poe. BB8 whistles a complaint about the comparison. “Sorry,” he offers to the droid.

Rey smiles. “I know.” She’s got her legs kicked up on an empty barrel of fuel and a datapad in her hand.

“Which is why we don’t let you play,” snaps Finn. She could play, if she wanted to, but most of the time she just opts for watching. She still associates gambling with the more belligerent sorts of creatures she had to watch out for on Jakku. It might be an unfair comparison, but it hinders her enjoyment of the games. She prefers social games to betting ones, ones that involve a lot of laughter and end with stories too embarrassing to share with anyone who wasn’t there.

“I thought it was because we can’t trust her not to use her cheaty Force powers,” suggests Betton. He’s already folded on the round, cards neatly stacked in front of him. 

“You should sneak your amplifier out of medbay after you get off shift,” suggests Poe in a stage whisper. He’s out too, so he has no personal stake to wanting Finn to win other than a grudge that is waning at a glacially slow pace. Each week, he hates Hux a microscopic amount less. By the time they’re Chewbacca’s age, he might have warmed up to a disinterested dislike. 

“Nah, Leia’s got those on tight lock-down: medical purposes only. She even has Trauri make me and Alebren sign them out before we leave.” Alebren’s mild Force sensitivity and medical background had made him a perfect candidate for the new Force healing method. Finn, he’s learning, but despite being as solicitous as possible to her during times of trouble, he has a terrible bedside manner with patients. The medical field doesn’t suit him (he’d referred to tissue repair as disgusting), but he’s helping out as best he can. “But, I don’t need the Force to beat this son of a bantha.”

“Then perhaps you should make your decision,” suggests Hux, hiding his amusement at the conversation. They might actually take him as being impatient too, but Rey knows better. He’s not bluffing, so he has all the time in the world to wait for Finn to make up his mind. 

It’s just the six of them under the bright hangar bay light. It’s not too late, but most of the ship is resting and recovering from the chaotic day. Their moments of peace are infrequent and always following or preceding something huge and dangerous. Rey turns back to the datapad. It takes her so long to read because once she spells it out in her head, she then has to give the word connotation and then larger sentence context. She’s improving so slowly. Hux seems to think she’s just speeding along and he really believes it too, but she can’t help feeling like a dumb desert rat, especially when he has so many long passages he can just recite from memory, like it isn’t a challenge.

“Okay fine. To win big you have to do what?” Finn asks loudly.

“Lose big,” say Poe and Betton in unison.

“And what am I doing?”

“Losing big.” It sounds like a saying, but Rey’s never heard it before.

“I’m in. Show me what you’ve got!” Finn lays down his cards so firmly that he nearly creases them. 

Hux is tickled with himself, but he keeps a passive face as he reveals his hand. Finn curses, pushing himself up from the makeshift table. He’s already vowing vengeance and Poe rises too, with a chuckle and a shake of his head. 

“Alright buddy,” he soothes with a slap to Finn’s shoulder. “You lost big, just like you planned.”

“I was trying to win big,” Finn sulks.

Poe grabs the coat that used to be his and passes it to Finn. “Come on, I’ll walk you back to your quarters. Hux, good game, man. Betton, always a pleasure. And Rey, thanks for your help earlier.” She always seizes available chances to get her hands inside a ship, so when she says that it’s no problem, she really means it. If it wasn’t for connection to the Force, she has no doubt the Resistance would have made her a full-time technician. 

Betton takes a look at his chronometer and swears. “Man, how did it get to be that late? I might be the worst guard ever.”

Finn gives Rey a side hug since she’s still balancing on a barrel. “Night,” he says and she squeezes tight, wishing him one back. “I’ll get you next time!” he threatens. Hux doesn’t appear worried. 

“Hey, Chance, we gotta get you locked up.” Betton bites his lip. “We’re already almost two hours late.” He started calling the former general Second Chance, which quickly got whittled down to just Chance, after Hux managed to avoid getting the death penalty. Rey was surprised, given his half-sister, that his acceptance had come so readily. Hux had been sure it was a trick to get in close and finish the job himself, but then, Hux was used to dealing with people who laid such schemes.

“Can I walk with you two?” Rey asks, shutting her datapad off and hopping down to the floor. She snatches up her new staff and the three leave the hangar towards the brig. Considerately, Betton falls back, allowing her and Hux a bit of privacy in their conversation. 

Hux next to her asks, “How is Wrecker’s Wrath going?”

“I’ll be older than Leia by the time I finish it.”

His eyes smile at her. “A shame you picked such trash to devote so many years of your life to reading.” He’d wanted her to read a book by Lotain who she’d discovered has a reputation for being incomprehensibly dense and political. She’d gone with lighter fare, something pulpy that is supposed to be easy to read, in theory. 

Rey rubs her eyes. “I never have time. Between attacks on the First Order, training with Leia, teaching Finn and Alebren Force control, searching for Snoke, fleet maintenance…”

“That is a lot,” he interrupts. It’s said in his snotty mocking tone and she bumps her shoulder into his. 

She prefers walking the corridors when the crew is mostly asleep. Of course, being that they’re in space, the ship is never actually empty, but it’s good to have quiet sometimes. She can hear the hum of satisfaction from Hux. “Was it a good day?” No doubt everyone had regaled him with stories of the battle, the one that he didn’t have the opportunity to participate in. He wouldn’t, he tells her. He doesn’t intend to end another life. His life is going to be only about making things better. Still, she worries that he will feel outside since he is in a very real sense. 

“Definitely. The request I sent three weeks ago to one of the Order’s backers was accepted today. The Resistance will get additional funding.”

She gapes. “That’s amazing!” Then, she realizes that this has been his first real act of sedition. She gives him a worried glance which he dismisses with a wave of his hand. “It can hardly be a secret by now that I’m a turncoat. Besides, they cut contact after the cataclysm, so I think they were as appalled by their actions as we are. The General underestimates the importance of financial backing, probably a side effect of having been raised as royalty. Once we do defeat the Order, many occupied territories will be seeking our assistance, or, if not ours, whatever the Resistance turns into once there’s no longer anything to Resist. I’m more interested in seeing those funds go towards rebuilding than warfare.”

Hux is good at speaking, even just casually like this. It’s easy to see why so many followed him. He somehow manages to see both the big picture and the individual steps needed to make it appear.

“It seems like there’s always something to fight.”

“As long as there’s men out there like me.”

She shakes her head, reaches her hand out and takes his. “Men like you used to be.”

“So you believe that I’ve reformed?” Hux asks and if she didn’t know better, she’d think he was serious. He has too good of a deadpan and she’s still learning when a joke is really a joke with him. “I’ve heard many rumors that it’s all an act and that I’m a double agent, feeding intel back to the First Order.”

“Poe thought that, at first.” His long fingers squeeze hers. She likes the way their arms naturally sway when they walk like this, like they haven’t a care in the world rather than the truth, that they have all the cares of the whole galaxy.

“Oh, I’m aware.” Rey had been surprised by her friends’ open antagonism, but as the months have passed and the former general has yet to show signs of betrayal, they’ve been softening. It helps that she can read Hux’s mind and that they trust her to let him know if anything nefarious pops up in there. He sure does have mean thoughts, but they are of the snarky personal nature, and not those of an evil despot.

“They still don’t like me,” he says, but not in a petulant way, just matter-of-fact.

“Well, do you like them?” she asks.

Hux considers. “I like Poe.”

She’s not surprised that he doesn’t like Finn. There had been a rivalry between them that she’d pretended not to understand for her own sanity. He’s made more friends than just her closest, though. He’s not easy to like for most people, still reserved and judgmental, but he’s learning. Like her reading, it won’t come quickly or easily. “He’s meaner to you than Finn,” she says.

“Exactly, with Finn, it’s about what he doesn’t say.”

They’ve arrived at his cell, which because of the objects he’s accumulating has become more of a very cramped apartment, and he bends down and kisses her cheek gently. She closes her eyes as his face lingers a moment. She smells the shaving cream she’d bought him with her own money from a marketplace on Yavin. “Goodnight, Scavenger.”

“Goodnight, Hux.”

Betton comes up and unlocks the cell door mechanism. “Night, Betton.”

“Night, Chancey. Don’t let me keep you out so late, okay? They’re gonna yell at me tomorrow.” 

Hux enters the cell, tossing a quick glance to Rey before disappearing behind the closed door. She’s been up too long and a yawn bumps into her, unexpected. She doubts the nightmares will come tonight. She’s too tired and she feels pretty satisfied. They’ve been through so much, will still have more to go through, if the galaxy has anything to say about it, but for now, things aren’t so bad. They’re all helping each other make it better, working through their sorrows and mistakes together. They do their best.


End file.
